The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction (Southern Literary Studies)

The Real South

SOUTHERN LITER ARY STUDIES fred hobson, Series Editor

The Real South Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction SCOT T ROM I N E

Louisiana State University Press

Baton Rouge

Published by Louisiana State University Press Copyright © 2008 by Louisiana State University Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First printing designer: Amanda McDonald Scallan typeface: MrsEaves typesetter: J. Jarrett Engineering, Inc. Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Romine, Scott. The real South: southern narrative in the age of cultural reproduction / Scott Romine. p. cm. — (Southern literary studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8071-3329-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. American literature— Southern States—History and criticism. 2. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Literature and technology—Southern States—History—20th century. 4. Southern States—Intellectual life— 20th century. 5. Place (Philosophy) in literature. 6. Regionalism in literature. I. Title. PS261.R535 2008 810.9′97509045—dc22 2007047235 The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. >

To Olivia and Isabella

Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. tara! tara! tara! Gone with the Wind and the Work of Cultural Reproduction 27 2. place into culture Tony Horwitz, V. S. Naipaul, and Travel on a Late Southern Theme 60 3. real / black /south Roots, Seams, and Cultural Reproduction 98 4. simulation and civil rights Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle and the Swamp of the Real 131 5. mass south / mapped south The Ambiguous Terrains of Bobbie Ann Mason and James Wilcox 153 6. southern homes after the family Deregulated Reality in Barry Hannah and Josephine Humphreys 192 7. southern loops A Circular Conclusion 226 Notes 239 Works Cited 265 Index 279

Acknowledgments

A 2005 research assignment from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro gave me much-needed time to complete a draft of this book. Thanks also to my colleagues at UNC–Greensboro, especially to Michael Parker, Christian Moraru, Ali Schultheis, Mary Ellis Gibson, and Chris Hodgkins for their hallway conversations that have in some way shaped this project, and to Jim Evans, Denise Baker, and Anne Wallace for their leadership in continuing a tradition of collegiality that has thankfully marked my professional career. Collegiality also marks the field of southern literary studies, and I thank for various insights, bits of information, criticisms, and suggestions Suzanne Jones, Riché Richardson, Martyn Bone, Fred Hobson, Anne Goodwyn Jones, Katie McKee, Robert Brinkmeyer, Richard Godden, Jack Matthews, Deborah Cohn, Jennifer Greeson, and Barbara Ladd, none of whom, of course, is responsible for the opinions and arguments advanced here. Thanks to Katherine Henninger for sharing with me a draft of her chapter on Daughters of the Dust from Ordering the Facade, which was published after this project was largely complete. Warmest thanks to Jon Smith for the hundreds of emails, conversations, and criticisms; also for his borderline altruism (rare in a narcissist) in organizing numerous conferences, panels, and special issues that have advanced the field. A graduate seminar based loosely on this project allowed me to air, in preliminary form, many of the arguments contained therein, and I thank the students of that class for their critiques. A symposium sponsored by the Hickory Hill Forum provided a stimulating environment for thinking—both silently and out loud—about many of issues addressed in this project. An earlier version of chapter 4 appeared as “Simulation and Civil Rights: The Magic of the Swamp of the Real in Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle,” and an earlier section of chapter 6 was published as “Orphans All: Reality Homesickness in Yonder Stands Your Orphan” in Perspectives on Barry Hannah, edited by Martyn Bone (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007): 161–82. Thanks to Seetha Srinivasan, director of the University Press of Mississippi, and Noel Polk, editor of Mississippi Quarterly, for permission to reprint this material. Thanks also to Martyn Bone for his extraordinarily helpful editing of the Hannah essay. From John Easterly down,

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the staff of the Louisiana State University Press has been predictably gracious and professional. Thanks to my father, Jerry Romine, for a constant stream of email attachments (including the picture of the Dale Earnhardt fan with the “3” shaved in his back) demonstrating how southern culture is reproduced on the Internet. The Internet also put me in touch with Iowa’s Scott Romine (an English teacher) and Arkansas’s Scott Romine (owner of a reproduction of the General Lee from “The Dukes of Hazzard”), thereby suggesting a kind of cosmic alignment behind this project. Mike Beckham and Paul Beckham helpfully fielded questions about Turner South and other matters. Thanks also to Brian Miller and the guys at team Rex Kwon Do. Finally, thanks to my wife, Karen Weyler, and my two daughters, Olivia and Isabella, who bring joy to my life.

The Real South

Introduction

In his 1972 The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America, John Egerton lamented an “amalgamation of regions that spreads and perpetuates the banal and the venal while it melts the great and valuable diversity of America into a homogenizing purée.” A decade later, Edwin M. Yoder offered an inverted jeremiad of Dixie’s “Dixiefication,” its willing participation in self-caricature and the commodifying logic of capitalist enterprise.1 The two trends, of course, are not only reconcilable, but organically related under the standard account of globalization. In this account, the homogenizing pressures of a global economy initiate a recursive retreat to the local; whether this retreat is efficacious is a matter of some disagreement. Indeed, Egerton and Yoder were prescient in predicting two subgenres of globalization narrative: on the one hand, the story of McWorld popularized by Benjamin Barber wherein everyone eschewing jihadism will eventually eat the same Big Mac, and on the other, the story of Disney World, wherein local differences are relentlessly absorbed and reproduced by a commodifying regime of spectacle and simulacra. Both Egerton and Yoder place the Real Dixie in jeopardy, either as an absolute loss of culture under the homogenizing force of Americanization or as a simulation of culture—Dixiefication, not Dixie—that marks continuity itself as a fake. Both accounts are chronologically arranged as series of causes and effects—that is to say, they are narratives. And from the distance of two decades, both look increasingly like chapters in the much longer story of the South’s demise, reports of which we can now label, with some confidence, as greatly exaggerated. Surely no region, or culture, or nation, or place—whatever the South is— has been more often subjected to premature eschatology. Although The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction ranges well beyond the imagined geography of Dixie per se (a territory associated, in my mind at least, with a white quasi nation always, already consigned to an irretrievable past—a place where a certain kind of I wishes that it were), it explores the South’s persistence in what I call the age of cultural reproduction. My dissonant allusion to Walter Benjamin is not unintentional. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin famously defined aura as that which withers in mechanical reproduction, a thesis consonant with a wide range of discourses defending southern traditions from the encroachments of modernity and its me-

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chanical praxis. But however ugly it sounds to the contemporary ear, mechanical reproduction had, for Benjamin, a primarily “positive form”—specifically, in its “cathartic . . . liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage.” By detaching the reproduced object from the “domain of tradition,” Benjamin argued, mechanical reproduction penetrated the smoke and mirrors of ritual to access “an aspect of reality free of all equipment.”2 One of the recurring questions of this study is whether a mechanically reproduced South is preferable to an authentic one. Another is whether Benjamin’s liquidation of culture and detachment from tradition actually operate in an age of reproductions, counterfeits, and simulacra that hardly liberate reality in the way Benjamin predicted. The South is full of fakes—Civil War reenactments and plantation tourism, to name two—infinitely preferable to their originals and arguably descended from them. Even so, faking it acquires, almost inevitably, the negative connotations associated with the work of Benjamin’s longtime antagonist Theodor Adorno, in his pessimistic critique of the culture industry. Still, if mechanical reproduction tells a different story than does the industrialization of culture, the two stories are equally committed to a discontinuous narrative of historical rupture. Cultural reproduction, however, describes what cultures are supposed to do and are supposed always to have done. My subtitle, then, signals a double narrative of continuity and rupture, a doubling I wish less to adjudicate than to preserve, since it is in precisely this liminal space that, I argue, contemporary southern narrative has found something like a home ground. (If cultural reproduction describes an age in which organic culture is gone for good, it also reminds us that culture was never organic in the first place.) For similar reasons, I refer to the contemporary South as the “late South,” a term that references simultaneously the condition of intensified continuity (as in “late modernity” and “late capitalism”) and the condition of recent termination (as in “the late C. Vann Woodward”). The term also signals, I hope, a certain ironic distance from its own potential for eschatological grandeur, a potential I find almost inevitable in discussions of the South’s fate. Can culture reproduce itself via reproduction that is increasingly dominated by mass media, global corporations, and the logic of commodification? Can cultures and traditions flourish or even survive in liquidated form? It’s not, after all, that Egerton and Yoder weren’t on to something. Still, the real South whose decline they announce differs fundamentally from the real South around which this project is organized, which has little to do with a cultural or social actuality distributed evenly over a coherent space. By real South, I refer to something more like the “real”/”South”: a set of anxious, transient, even artificial intersections, sutures, or common surfaces between two concepts that are themselves remark-

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ably fluid: think of the ink that has been spilled describing what reality really is, or what the South really is. (“Reality,” as Vladimir Nabokov reminds us, is “one of the few words which mean nothing much without quotes”; “South,” I suggest, is another of these words.)3 My concern, rather, is with the ink (and other meaningbearing media) that has been spilled over (or on or in the fissures of) precisely those intersections and surfaces in an effort to understand late southern cultures, as inflected by or colliding with other “kinds” of culture (mass, pop, late capitalist, American, global, and so forth), as cultures and to do so without reiterating some imaginary division between them and culture “proper.” This will involve, among other things, being suspicious of a hermeneutics of suspicion that understands reality to lurk, categorically, beneath surfaces. Such suspicions are especially warranted where culture is concerned, given that stories about it characteristically deploy metaphors of depth and longevity to naturalize current arrangements and practices. Just as often, however, efforts to locate culture turn out to dislocate it from the here and now—that is, to defer its imagined “true” or “authentic” existence to some nostalgic past or utopian future. As Zygmunt Bauman observes, the ideas of culture and identity emerge simultaneously “because of that experience of underdetermination and free-floatingness which came to be articulated ex post facto as ‘disembeddedment.’ ” 4 Culture has a habit of not being where and when we are presently. In attempting to describe the work of narrative as it engages the cultures of the late South, I want, then, to avoid the potentially positivist implications of such description: like “work,” “culture” is a noun that behaves like a verb. As an analytical matter, the difficulty lies in untangling how, as narratives go about performing cultural work—mobilizing desirable pasts and futures, reconciling the arrangements they describe with the arrangements that ought to be, weaving space into time with both subtlety and violence, all in an effort to provide an account of the relation between subjects and environments—they do so now. For many reasons, the U.S. South provides an ideal site for such investigation: its tortured and complex relation to contemporary economic pressures and to flows of culture that are increasingly global and dispersed in nature; its acute absorption and production of declension and progress as culture-stories; and its fraught and anxious relation—in which most of the above are embedded—with authenticity. We might well expect an interesting collision between a culture that wears its history on its sleeve—didn’t Faulkner say that history isn’t even past?— and the cultural logic of late capitalism, where historicity is reduced to surfaces (if not a sleeve, then the front of a t-shirt), and where memory, as Andreas Huyssen observes, is consumed as spectacle and commodity.5 We might well expect dissonance to attend, under a regime of what David Harvey calls time-space compres-

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sion, a culture historically (and often fetishistically) devoted to its insularity. Pick your postmodern poison: the South is adequately dosed—fatally dosed, some would say. I do not claim any special relationship between the South and the mechanics of post- or late modernity except one of intensification. As I shall argue, the South’s relatively abrupt entrance into modernity and its aftermath has generated a kind of time-space compression compression, if you will, wherein the South’s cultural and economic “backwardness” relative to the U.S. nation has, ironically enough, placed it in the avant-garde of contemporary cultural poetics. In short, the South was telling stories about the assault on its culture well before such stories—of the assault of something by something—operated as a kind of grand narrative in an age supposedly without them: the assault of the local by the global; of place by tourism; of history by the museum; of the real by the simulacrum; of authenticity by mechanical reproduction; of coherent space by time-space compression; of depth by surface; of value by consumerism. Fredric Jameson, who offers one of most powerful (and bleakest) versions of this narrative, suggests that regionalism is itself ineffectual against “a genuinely global late capitalism” that penetrates local populations by “adapting its various goods to suit . . . vernacular languages and practices.” The penetration, Jameson says, of “corporations into the very heart of local and regional culture” makes it “difficult to decide whether it is authentic any longer (and indeed whether that term still means anything). It is the EPCOT syndrome raised to a global scale . . . since now the ‘regional’ as such becomes the business of global American Disneyland-related corporations, who will redo your own native architecture for you more exactly than you can do it for yourself [emphasis added].” For Jameson, the region gravitates toward the condition and logic of what he calls the module: prefabricated difference at the service of global standardization.6 But to begin to unpack this narrative, we might ask what authenticity did mean, when it did mean something. The doublebind of the word, which is at its core an advertising word, is that it cannot properly refer to anything: once something is called “authentic,” it already isn’t. More precisely, authenticity articulates a structure of desire and hence of absence; for Jameson, that means the absence of global corporations. As it does for Jean Baudrillard; as it did for the Nashville Agrarians. One reason, I suggest, that southern studies has never quite been able to get over the Agrarians, despite their retrograde politics and numerous overt attempts at academic assassination, is that their localized culture war predicted the broader forms that cultural warfare would assume over the course of their century and into the next. In particular, the Agrarians mobilized an idea of culture against the forms of “disembeddedment” generated by the modern economy against which they

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brought to bear their considerable rhetorical talents. I’ll Take My Stand is, above all, an abortive intervention in desire that strives to counter desire’s manipulation in the age of “modern advertising”—the “most significant development of our industrialism,” Ransom writes in the volume’s introduction, precisely because it enables producers to “coerce and wheedle the public into being loyal and steady consumers.”7 Against advertising and the kindred ills of finance capitalism, Ransom and his cohort juxtapose a model of inheritance and tradition grounded in the economy of an agrarian society. But remarking “how much of their inheritance is artifice, how little merely ‘passed on,’ ” Lewis Simpson concludes, in what has come to seem self-evident, that “no American writers ever worked harder at inheriting their inheritance than the Agrarians.”8 Although for Simpson such labor is implicitly fraudulent, the work of inheriting inheritance has come to define a progressively larger share of the labor expended in the field of cultural production. One can easily imagine other writers—not to mention directors, musicians, and visual artists—wresting from the Agrarians the distinction Simpson bestows. But however effectively they performed the work of inheritance, the Agrarians were singularly unsuccessful in marketing that inheritance to their contemporaries. “It is strange, of course,” they write, “that a majority of men anywhere could ever as with one mind become enamored of industrialism: a system that has so little regard for individual wants,” but in the real South, enamored they were.9 Hence the tone of exasperation underlying the entirety of I’ll Take My Stand: why doesn’t the (actual) South want the (authentic) South? If, Michael Kreyling observes, the Agrarians, “like all dedicated elites, . . . more or less manipulated the image of the problem their time and place embodies so that their solution seemed unavoidable,” we should further observe that their rigged solution competed with Madison Avenue as well. It lost. In the realm of production, where it focused most of its attention, the Agrarians’ South competed just as badly against the South of tax breaks and cheap, nonunion labor that, as James Cobb shows in The Selling of the South, was being marketed contemporaneously.10 Still, I suggest that the Agrarians were not simply bad advertisers, but advertisers working in a market that had not yet evolved, precisely because the South, mired in a cash-poor agrarian economy, could not yet afford it. Read against the grain as a marketing strategy for the South of a consumption-based economy—the South of the museum, the reenactment, the themed space, and the tourist destination—the Agrarians’ genius comes into sharp focus. In describing how a southern chair might be not just a chair but a container of a “whole way of life” are the Agrarians not describing why one might want to buy an antique southern chair—perhaps even a mechanically reproduced one? (As a character in Josephine Humphreys’s Rich in Love puts it, why buy a regular

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chair, when you can get one with history behind it? Why, indeed?) When Donald Davidson praises the South for keeping culture at home in the folk and decorative arts rather than segregating it in special places like museums and concert halls, is he not offering a logic for decorating one’s house with southern folk art? My suggestion, in other words, is that the Agrarians were not too late for a South already corrupted by a capitalized and industrialized economy, but too early for a postindustrial economy wherein the flexible accumulation of capital would drive, and be driven by, the flexible accumulation of culture. Offering an aesthetics of labor as “one of the happy functions of human life,” they unwittingly provided an aesthetics of late southern leisure and consumption. Over the pages of I’ll Take My Stand, the South of the culture industry hovers ghostlike. To recognize the paradox of the Agrarian project, then, is to recognize the potential for capitalist commodification already embedded in a project overtly hostile to capitalist commodification. In offering a version of the capitalist threat narrative—the story, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, that “capitalism is rootless, with no tradition of its own, and therefore parasitical upon previous traditions, a universal order which can thrive everywhere . . . uprooting and slowly corroding all particular lifeworlds based on specific traditions”—the Agrarians generated a problematics of culture that has only intensified under a regime of late capitalism wherein ideas of “culture” are often conjured as antidotes to the pressures of the homogenizing market.11 But as Žižek observes, such accounts are narrative in fact as well as form, easily deployed as temporal, causal “solutions” to pressing synchronic tensions. Thus, tradition requires a narrative apparatus or sequence (tradition → modernity) that conceals modernity’s actual status as tradition’s constitutive underside. Žižek’s scheme, in other words, requires that we view the Agrarians’ putatively historical account of a tradition under assault (in real time, from the outside) as a way of manipulating (as Kreyling puts it) contemporaneous and competing orders of cultural power so that its solutions seem self-evident. It is, in short, a strategic account of southern culture and history. Real history, Žižek says, doesn’t work this way, since “historical process does not follow the logic of narration: actual historical breaks are, if anything, more radical than mere narrative deployments, since what changes in them is the entire constellation of emergence and loss. In other words, a true historical break does not simply designate the ‘regressive’ loss (or ‘progressive’ gain) of something, but the shift in the very grid which enables us to measure losses and gains.”12 Žižek’s differentiation of narration and historical process will resonate (uneasily) throughout this study, not least because his scheme generates radical ambiguity: one person’s grid shift might well constitute another’s

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narrativized loss or gain. How, practically speaking, does one distinguish a true historical break from a mere story about one, real gains and losses from those of a purely narrative sort? Most concretely in the context of this project, Žižek’s ambiguity informs whether the period under analysis—roughly 1970 to the present— comes in the aftermath of a historical rupture, or merely extends by intensifying historical trends already under way. Postmodern or late modern? Postsouthern or late southern? Or just southern? The problem is acute because stories of progress and decline are never mere registers, but invariably lend themselves to particular social, cultural, and political usages. In The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction, Martyn Bone provocatively reworks the Agrarian account of how capitalist pressures erode place in his own scholarly effort to “recover the relation between postsouthern literature and the social reality of ‘place(lessness)’ in a late capitalist post-South.” With caveats of a sort I will repeat in reverse, Bone commits himself to the theory of a break, arguing that the “region we have known and narrated as ‘the South’ . . . may in fact have ceased to exist as a distinctive economic-geographic entity.” Still, Bone continues, the “social practice and production of place continues. Whether one likes it or not, capitalist land speculation and real-estate development play a major role in the reproduction—the creative destruction—of traditional ‘southern’ loci.”13 Whether “one” likes it or not, Bone clearly doesn’t: hence his emphasis on reproduction, reworked immediately as creative destruction. (I like it a bit better: hence my emphasis on reproduction as a site of negotiating rupture and continuity.) According to Jon Smith, however, in a review of Bone’s book, “There’s only a ‘break’ if, like [Lewis] Simpson, you’re a neoagrarian fantasist, or, like [Fredric] Jameson, you’re overinvested in postmodern exceptionalism.” Instead, Smith argues that “absent essentialism—i.e. as space, as a portion, however arbitrarily bounded, of the surface of the earth—the South remains, by definition, the South, and the present South, with all its sprawling contradictions, must organically have grown out of earlier ones.” Although I want to return momentarily to the question of whether there is a South “by definition,” the point to be made here is that narratives of rupture and continuity support tactical (scholarly) projects of different sorts—for Bone, an account of southern cities as dystopian effects of postnational finance capitalism; for Smith, an account of cities as “the best thing yet to happen to the South”—and further, that they do so by suturing southern stories to southern spaces.14 In the pages that follow, sutures of this sort will recur frequently as an analytical concern; indeed, my own definition of the South, such as it is, would be precisely as a field of suture.

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Stories that use the South by purporting to map it are no new thing, as two nineteenth-century passages responding to the question of southern secession will illustrate: It is true that science has achieved, over space and time, triumphs almost miraculous, but it has not annihilated them. . . . It is almost impossible to conquer nature. . . . In examining, then, the conflicting characters of two great sections, it is no unfavourable introduction to such an investigation, to discover that nature herself has drawn deeply the sectional lines. In reality, if North and South formed two autonomous countries, like, for example, England and Hanover, their separation would be no more difficult than was the separation of England and Hanover. “The South,” however, is neither a territory closely sealed off from the North geographically, nor a moral unity. It is not a country at all, but a battle slogan.15 The first passage, from William Henry Trescot’s 1850 “The Position and Course of the South” (literally) naturalizes sectional differences in order to justify splitting the nations that have—organically, as it were—developed from them. Terrain precedes and predicts territoriality; as it would be later for Scarlett O’Hara, it’s all about the land. But just as Scarlett’s “land” constitutes an elaborate fiction, so Trescot’s determines a particular—and particularly artificial—story about the South. “Not only has nature drawn these lines,” he writes, “but history, in the action of its providential instinct, has followed their guidance.”16 Once its position is established, the South’s secession becomes a matter of course; intersectional rupture is necessary if sectional identity is to survive. But cause and effect are easily reversed when we recognize that Trescot’s course necessitates that he position the South—his South, at any rate—as naturally separate from its northern counterpart. The second passage, from Karl Marx’s 1861 article “The Civil War in the United States,” tells a different story altogether. Here, the absence of geographical “separation” points up the illegitimacy of southern secession. (Frederick Law Olmsted employs an identical logic in The Cotton Kingdom of the same year, claiming that “an arbitrary political line may divide the north part from the south part, but there is no such line in nature: there can be none, socially.”)17 Decoding Trescot’s South as (mere) battle slogan, Marx silently generates a battle slogan of his own: his map of the South, too, terminates in a project of warfare, this one to suppress the South’s revolutionary intentions. Today, the positions staked out by Trescot and Marx seem uncannily familiar. As Trescot says, nature still resists time-space compres-

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sion, although it continues to be compressed at an accelerating rate; as Marx suggests, the South still operates as a battle slogan, often in projects of decompressing space and time against modernity’s late encroachments. As deterritorialization proceeds apace, efforts to reterritorialize—to reproduce place and locality—are increasingly mobilized under the aegis of tradition, heritage, culture, and identity. Put another way, we are still reproducing and naturalizing the South as place in an age defined, according to one story (Jameson’s postmodern one), by “nature” being “gone for good.” (But it is almost impossible to conquer nature.) Mapping the South is always a situated venture and always implicitly narrative: a way of mobilizing space in efforts of immense variety and scope, ranging from (at the macro level) the red state mythology of contemporary American politics to more localized efforts to generate more intimate and compelling microSouths. To suggest that the South isn’t going anywhere is not to say that it is impervious to motion. On the contrary, my premise is that the late South is mobilized in an increasingly diverse range of cultural projects. l The Real South is a study of the fake South, which I argue becomes the real South through the intervention of narrative. That the South is increasingly sustained as a virtual, commodified, built, themed, invented, or otherwise artificial territoriality— that is, as it becomes less imaginable as a “natural” or “organic” culture, if that antinomic construction ever existed—has hardly removed it from the domain of everyday use. Even if the South, as Michael Kreyling delightfully puts its, had become by the 1970s a “way of making and maintaining meaning [that] had ceased functioning, as it were, on involuntary muscles,” voluntary muscles do important work, not least in the domain of culture.18 Indeed, while I am not persuaded that they were ever truly involuntary, it seems self-evident that the cultural muscles of the late South are more voluntary than ever and that they do more kinds of work. If a tradition that must “be automatically operative before it can be called tradition” (to borrow Allen Tate’s classic formulation) doesn’t operate automatically or even habitually, then its dysfunction may, as Stephen Connor observes, “actually intensif[y] the desire for origin, even if that origin is increasingly sensed as an erotic lack rather than a tangible and satisfying presence.”19 Noting the South’s long history of cultural nostalgia, Edward Ayers writes that “from its very beginning, people have believed that the South, defined against an earlier South that was somehow more authentic, more real, more unified and distinct, was not only disappearing but declining.”20 What specifically, then, is new about the demon-

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strably old news of a South in decline—a southern culture mobilized around the project of recovering an authentic, real southern culture—that would justify referring to the contemporary South as the late South? Although my answers here will be tentative, I begin with the salience of authenticity and reality themselves as they are attached to questions of culture and tradition. Is Roots authentic? Is Garth Brooks a real country singer? Does Mama Dip’s Kitchen serve authentic soul food? Is Atlanta part of the real South, the New South, the No South, or (as Tony Horwitz maintains) the anti-South? Such questions make sense not because they are intrinsically sensible questions—a century ago, their equivalents would have been nonsensical—but because they reference a cultural competency: the ability to discriminate between the authentic and the fake. That competency, I suggest, is widely diffused in contemporary society. One of the premises of this study is that reality and authenticity have escaped the province of the cultural expert, the metaphysician, and the connoisseur to become matters of everyday practice, conceptual tools that individuals and groups use to probe and test their worlds, to orient scenarios, and to project themselves imaginatively into social spaces. For this reason, The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction is less interested in defining terms such as “authentic” and “real” as metaphysical or psychoanalytic categories than in understanding how individuals and groups use these concepts in a region and an age compelled by them. But precisely here, in the domain of reality’s usage, we confront a self-evident and fundamental contradiction: on the one hand, the Real is associated with matters of habituation, normal practice, everyday use, and routine (a usage that aligns it with the actual), and on the other, it appears as a function of desire (a usage that aligns it with the ideal). Reality describes at once what we have (as in “the real world,” with its bills and other unpleasantries from which college students are said to be protected) and what we want (as in The Real Thing™).21 So, too, I suggest, with culture. In his provocative consideration of the relation between essentialism and culture, Walter Benn Michaels argues that “without racial essentialism we have no way of imagining a discrepancy between our culture on the one hand and our actual beliefs and practices on the other. And it is only this discrepancy that makes possible exemplary culturalist projects of recovering our culture, defending our culture, stealing someone else’s culture, etc.”22 I would argue, by contrast, that culture itself entails this discrepancy—more precisely, that culture depends on a discrepancy between a group’s actual practices and its ideal image of itself. Culture, in other words, is intrinsically aspirational and projective because it is a representational solution to the problem of social disembedding: as Bauman says, it is “born as a problem (that is, as something one needs to do something about—as a task),” since

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“it would not have congealed into a visible and graspable entity in any other but the ‘disembedded’ or ‘unencumbered’ form.”23 One of the broad shifts I trace in this project is from an understanding of culture as a field of regulation determined by filiation—the South in which “you’d have to be born” (perhaps, as the bumper sticker has it, “by the Grace of God”)—to a field of desire defined by looser forms of affiliation. This is what makes “the South,” to borrow Bauman’s phrasing, a noun that behaves like a verb. Here, however, I am slightly distorting Bauman’s argument in a way that illustrates, I think, a shift in the meaning of culture underlying the logic of cultural reproduction. In their immediate context, Bauman’s claims are made specifically of identity, to which he links culture later on as a kind of afterthought; so culture, I suggest, can be “thought” only after its identitarian dimension emerges forcefully, that is to say, undeniably—an emergence I link to the pressures of a modern economy, the distinctive forms of social disembedding it carries, and the increased contact with other cultures that it brings through media and diffuse population flows. This is not to conjure an insular or precapitalist South, but to insist upon the democratization of global economic stresses and intensified cultural contacts as they are brought to bear as an everyday matter for contemporary southerners. In today’s South, a global economy isn’t just for planters anymore. Similarly, I suggest that culture itself is democratized as the stresses of a modern economy introduce a gap between the culture we have and the one we want, a gap that in turn permits culture’s salience as a graspable entity. A way of life is only intelligible as such in comparison with something: either its disruption or another way of life. Modern economies and media enact the one and introduce the other as a matter of course, and they do so with increasing force. Conceiving, then, of culture as an account of how “I” fits into “We” and how “I/ We” fits into the world, I follow Arjun Appadurai’s insistence that the imagination acquires a newly significantly role in the postelectronic world, breaking out of “the special expressive space of art, myth, and ritual and . . . becom[ing] a part of the quotidian mental work of ordinary people in many societies.” Appadurai’s conception of imagination as implicitly projective and expressive orients my own understanding of culture as increasingly imaginative and improvisational—less a matter, that is, of fitting into social domains than of sticking oneself into them.24 Put another way, the voluntary muscles of the late South make culture less a matter of accepting an existing account of how I fit than of improvising an account of how I stick (myself). The irony here is that capitalism gives with the one hand what it takes away with the other: if it is, on some level, responsible for the broadly diffused experience of dislocation and disembedding, it also offers solutions in prepackaged and commodified forms of culture. This is why advertising comes so natu-

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rally to culture: both constitute attempts to replenish aura in an age of mechanical reproduction. As Jon Smith has suggested, it is also why the South is increasingly legible as a brand.25 In the chapters that follow, my practice is to avoid thinking about the consumption of culture in terms that rehearse Adornian critiques of such consumption as passive and narcotic—an opiate of the masses in the precise sense of severing desire from reality. Probably my own thinking comes closest, in some respects, to the highly abstracted and dehistoricized account offered by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their sharp critique of the “traditional logic of desire.” In their analysis of capitalist deterritorialization in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that desire, improperly understood as “the lack of a real object,” leads theorists from Kant to Freud to posit erroneously a doubled reality in which “desire intrinsically produces an imaginary object that functions as a double of reality, as though there were a ‘dreamed-of object behind every real object,’ or a mental production behind all real productions,” an idea that terminates in “the world acquir[ing] as its double some other sort of world . . . . that contains the key to desire (missing in this world).”26 In contrast, they offer an essentialist account of desire as definitionally productive of the Real. For Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism’s radical innovation is that, unlike its predecessors, the territorial and despotic machines that encode and territorialize desire from the “outside,” capitalism “does not encode from the outside, but decodes and deterritorializes as a condition of its existence,” as “its primary determinant and its fundamental raw material, its form and function.” But after decoding and deterritorializing flows of desire, capitalism “institutes or restores all sorts of residual and artificial, imaginary, or symbolic territorialities, thereby attempting, as best it can, to recode, to rechannel persons who have been defined in terms of abstract quantities.” “Everything,” they write, “returns or recurs: States, nations, families.” So, too, I would add, regions, pasts, cultures, practices, and heritages. Under this regime, according to Deleuze and Guattari, “the real is not impossible, it is simply more artificial.”27 While this may restate a paradox in the guise of resolving it, that paradox lies at the heart of this project and its analysis of artificial territorialities with real people in them. Where the South is concerned, this involves rescuing imagined geographies from the domain of mere fantasy. Here I depart (taking a path well traveled in cultural studies) from Horkheimer and Adorno’s account of the culture industry, which strategically separates consumption from use. “Culture is a paradoxical commodity,” they argue. “So completely is it subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly consumed in use that it can no longer be used.”28 On the contrary, I view even the

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most industrialized forms of culture as useable, just as I view even the most overtly simulated or virtual Souths as inhabitable. This is not necessarily to view them as useful or as nice places to live. Here my approach is broadly pragmatic and explicitly antifoundationalist in that I tend to avoid adjudicating a relation (as “real” or not) between southern (re)productions and what the philosopher Donald Davidson might call the-South-under-no-description. Using Davidson as a fellow-traveling pragmatist through which he advances an argument of his own, Richard Rorty suggests that adjectives such as “real” or “better” should have less to do with relations between descriptions and “things-as-they-are-under-no-description” than with “ways of describing the relation between a description and the rest of the human practices within which the use of that description occurred.”29 In broadly adopting this logic and its attendant prioritizations—place over space, territoriality over terrain, memory over history, representation over referent—I mean neither to adopt a relativist position in which all southern reproductions are created equal nor to suppress entirely the relation between southern reproductions and the things-under-no-description to which they ostensibly refer. On the contrary, a sense of the latter is often essential to understanding the operations of the former. Still, my critical practice is to foreground the internal logics of reproductive modalities in an effort to situate them pragmatically within some context of “human practices” that renders them both legible and meaningful. In simplest terms, I ask of tradition, authenticity, heritage, and culture what Burke asked of liberty: for what purpose is it used? The corollary of this practice, to reiterate a point made earlier, is that I am less interested in whether cultures and traditions are “really” authentic than in what counts as authentic within stories of culture and tradition. My bias, in fact, is frankly presentist in that I view cultural reproduction as, first and foremost, a set of strategies adapted to a particular historical moment. Stories of the South then and now, for example, are likely to adjudicate differences between equally “contemporary” Souths. Consider, for example, the difference between the quaint southern hamlet advertised as allowing one “to go back in time” and the fictional terrain described in George Singleton’s Novel: “This was the year 1998, which meant about 1966 for Graywood County.”30 We instantly recognize the difference between going back to a good past and a bad one; that we are traveling in space, not time, is equally evident. Even in such trivial instances, I suggest, lurk stories of culture concerned less with whether the past was really good or bad than with how one might stick oneself into present environments. While it hardly warrants saying that there are better and worse ways of realizing the South, I want to indicate at the outset my wariness of constituting these differences empirically. To return to Smith’s assertion that “absent essentialism . . .

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the South is, by definition, the South,” I doubt that we can meaningfully say that there is a South by definition or (to use Davidson’s terminology) a South-underno-description; else why are we defining or describing “the South” in the first place? Whence the potentially “arbitrary” boundaries to which Smith gestures? Post-essentialist accounts of the South (as something like a mere geographical container) characteristically reiterate, or at least depend upon, earlier essentialist accounts of what generated such boundaries in the first place: this or that sociocultural feature or set of features that made the South the South. (At any rate, the South under analysis in this project is a matter of definitions and descriptions— more precisely, investments in those definitions and descriptions.) In practice, the “real South” often turns out to be the one I desire, and the practice is not infrequently coercive: a matter of getting you to accept my South, my heritage, my culture, and so forth as authentic. In my South, I take my stand—either relationally (as a way of placing myself relative to you) or coercively (as a strategy of wielding authenticity as authority).31 If, as I have suggested, South is a noun that behaves like a verb, it often behaves as an imperative verb. As Marx observed, there is a territorial logic at work in “the South” as battle slogan, and in this sense the Agrarians paradigmatically stake out their southern territory as the authentic one threatened by capitalist depredations. Writing of Third World “westernization” in terms that recall the Agrarian project, Signe Howell claims that a “preoccupation with authenticity and posited contamination of traditions is found . . . among an elite group of western intellectual thinking about the Third World and amongst groups anywhere concerned with creating ethnic or national boundaries or fighting for cultural survival.”32 At the same time, a concern for authenticity also informs less overtly nationalistic forms of cultural reproduction. In “Living Southern in Southern Living,” Diane Roberts describes how, every Christmas, she “puncture[s] the skin on my fingers sticking lemons and kumquats onto a Styrofoam cone with toothpicks, making a citrus centerpiece. An old family tradition. Or is it? No one in my house can swear that the idea didn’t really come from a picture in Southern Living of some Low Country plantation decorated for Twelfth Night.”33 Perhaps the most striking thing about this passage is that, insofar as we are competent late southerners, we immediately make sense of the difference between an authentic “old family tradition” and a fake one cribbed from Southern Living. At second and third glances, however, the difference begins to look curiouser and curiouser. How old, after all, could a family tradition be if it involves Styrofoam? Wouldn’t even an “old” tradition be copied from somewhere? Tradition, Howell argues persuasively, works precisely this way: it is always and everywhere a matter of innovation, ingenuity, and assimilation of alien

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elements—including the Coke bottles (genealogical origin: Atlanta, Georgia) incorporated into the traditional religious practice of the South Ryukyu islands.34 I am less willing, however, to follow Howell to the conclusion that a concern for pristine, uncontaminated tradition is, categorically speaking, a “dubious preoccupation.”35 As will become clear in the following chapters, I tend to view such preoccupations more as a neutral habit of late modernity, used for good and for ill to organize and mobilize social, cultural, and political projects of widely varying sorts. Although there is no reason to think that any culture is as pristine as it imagines it was, there is every reason to think that imagining this way helps to organize its present coherence and future prospects, and there is no reason to think that projects of cultural continuity, even the most overtly faked ones, are intrinsically pernicious. (In chapter 3, I briefly take up the sine qua non of cultural reproduction, Alex Haley’s Roots, in precisely these terms.) Neither is there any reason to assume the opposite. Even kumquatted Styrofoam, as Roberts acutely observes, obliquely serves Southern Living’s construction of an implicitly white, middle-class “refuge from the unlovely realities of the region it sets out to define and ameliorate.”36 In its logic of disavowal and forgetting, this project, in turn, retains something of a quasi-nationalist residue in the terms offered originally by Renan, who famously insisted that, where nationalism is concerned, forgetting is as important as memory. But if Southern Living conjures a kind of imagined community, it is an attenuated community that fails one of Benedict Anderson’s primary criteria for the nation: no one is willing to die for it.37 There is some comfort, I think, to be taken in that fact. Southern Living symptomizes the distinctively post-nationalist properties of the late South by marketing a South to which one can literally subscribe. In practice, the ascendance of cultural commodification correlates to the rise of what Werner Sollers calls communities of consent relative to communities of descent that, historically speaking, have made more powerful claims on the individual. One of the primary logics of cultural reproduction, I argue, is to elide differences between the two, simulating consent as descent as it reconstructs imagined pasts, histories, and genealogies in order to ensure that identities are grounded in something real, not conjured willy-nilly. As the territorial logics of earlier Souths give way to the pressures of deterritorialization generated, as Appadurai suggests, by mobility and media, the consequent proliferation of microSouths reproduces culture with a difference. Because such microSouths rely on a plausible genealogy—even Southern Living didn’t whip up its South from scratch—they potentially (and in many cases, actually) reproduce forms of social organization with long and unhappy histories. But if, on the one hand, preserving old divisions with the new technologies

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of the niche market may seem to point to the worst of all possible Souths, on the other, I am forced to conclude that the late South is the best of all actual Souths, not least because the thinning of culture has opened space itself to more flexible (if less coherent) usages. In my earlier book, The Narrative Forms of Southern Community, I examined various socio-formal practices, organized under the aegis of “community,” that worked to affirm and naturalize inertial and coercive social forms. Juxtaposed against such coercive forms of reality-production, the advantages of a deregulated reality come into clear focus. If one doesn’t subscribe to the South of Southern Living, then alternative subscriptions are available: the South of The Oxford American, the multicultural South often circulated in academic journals, the Dirty South playing on XM radio. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Turner South cable channel, which broadcasts under the brand “Turner South. Your South,” ran a series of public service announcements (or were they advertisements?) in which a series of celebrities explained that in “my South,” neighbors helped neighbors. Their South is one to which I subscribe—through TimeWarner cable, as it happens. Needless to say, there are as well Souths I judge to be less desirable than Southern Living’s: the neo-secessionist South of the Southern League, for example. But no one is dying—or killing—for that South either. Among the comforts of late southern cultures are discomforts, too. As the multiple forms of southern self-fashioning attenuate what Lyotard calls the “tyranny of we” in favor of localized language games that render consensus “an outmoded and suspect value,” the loss of consensus is alternatively experienced as an actual deficit.38 In Watching Jim Crow, Steven D. Classen aligns his analysis of civil rights media with Ellen Seiter’s suggestion that media studies should “enlarge the possibility of intelligible discourse between people quite different from one another in interest, outlook, wealth, and power, and yet contained in a world where, tumbled as they are into endless connection, it is increasingly difficult to get out of each other’s way.” I would argue just the opposite of Seiter: that in today’s world, it is increasingly easy to get out of each other’s way, not least because of the proliferation of media that has subjected representation itself to an increasingly fragmented market logic. As Classen shows, the limited media outlets of Jackson, Mississippi, in during the civil rights era “provided virtually no opportunities for black voices to be heard or pro-movement arguments to be made.” Recalling the era with what Classen characterizes as “an interesting mix of personal relief and loss,” a white programming director suggested that the “crude racism” of one Jackson station, WLBT, “couldn’t happen now,” since the media giants are interested in “just making money. And, of course, the audience is so fragmented nowadays. I can take my clicker and go wherever I want.”39 That mixture of relief and loss over what

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amounts to the balkanization of mediated space is, I suggest, pervasive in the late South. The capacity to “go” with a clicker wherever one wants—and how easily we understand watching as going, as traveling in (virtual) space—saliently juxtaposes the compensation of a represented world wherein we’re “at home” with the cost of our belief in a social domain “out there” (in real time, real space) that we might collectively inhabit. What J. Michael Dash calls a “temptation to grounded difference” operates even more temptingly among the virtualized and free-floating differences of an increasingly mediated world.40 l Central to my project, then, is an understanding of contemporary southern narrative as an archive of improvisations grounded in space and time, a register of imagined relations to artificial territorialities, themed spaces, virtual terrains, built environments, localities, and “the global”—imaginable precisely because of the breakdown of coded territorialities. Time and again in the stories in and about the late South, an opposition between the real and the fake emerges to perform crucial narrative work. My emphasis on improvisation foregrounds the heterogeneity of narrative paths occasioned—indeed, obliged—by deterritorialization, the proliferation of media, and the sampling of cultures possible in the late South. Central themes shrink in the presence of alternative thematics; unification gives way to the pressures of micronarratives and the microSouths they sustain. My choice of literary narrative as a primary analytical object was not inevitable, although it became more so with the publication of several works, including Tara McPherson’s Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South, and Helen Taylor’s Circling Dixie: Contemporary Southern Culture through a Transatlantic Lens, and Jon Smith’s forthcoming Alabama and the Future of American Studies, which focus more heavily than this project on nonliterary cultural forms. My interest in narrative as a mode of negotiating the spaces of the late South, will, I hope, supplement what has emerged as a vital and sophisticated body of cultural criticism, although my view of—and in some respects, my basic orientation toward—the late South differs, as will become clear, from these critics. Still, in a era when literary analysis itself occasionally looks like a retro practice, I want to offer a defense of the particular modalities narrative bring to bear on its engagement with social and cultural domains. Let me begin with a television tour and two literary meals. In January 2004, the Turner South cable channel aired an episode “ThreeDay Weekend” in which a couple, Anna and Todd, tour Franklin, Tennessee, in order to “escape their frenetic life” in Orlando.41 Given the frenetic pace of their

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leisure during their three-day weekend in Franklin, the escapist dimension is immediately put into question, as is the issue of whether they have moved to a more or less Disneyfied environment. Among their activities are the following: a stay at Namaste Bed and Breakfast, which offers rooms decorated in “western,” “Indian,” and “frontier cabin” styles; a tour of downtown Franklin, where a guide points out Confederate Civil War cannons manufactured in the North; antique shopping that turns up many reproductions and one authentic original, a “French table” produced locally in the early 1800s and listed at $18,000; breakfast at the Lovelace Café in Nashville, “a li’l ole house,” according to the owner, that serves “everything that the grandmother used to make” and is decorated with (among many other such photos) a signed LeAnn Rymes publicity shot; a tour of the Cheekwood estate and museum, where, according to the guide, “If someone didn’t want to go to Chicago or New York, they could come here and see the same kind of art”; a “Nash Trash” bus tour of Nashville conducted by the “Jugg Sisters,” whose routine involves songs like this one: “The Juggs will give you the dish / On stars like Reba and Trish”; a “trip back in time” to the Carter house, full of “remnants of life from 140 years ago,” including bullet holes from Civil War (reenactors parade outside); a canoe trip that make you “think you’re miles and miles away” from downtown Franklin, only a mile away; a horseback ride in which “riders are transformed into cowboys and cowgirls” (successfully, in the couple’s opinion, since the ride “kind of gets you back to nature”—“like you’re back in the 1800s”); and, finally, a visit to “The Factory,” a former stove factory remodeled to include a church, loft apartments, retail stores, restaurants, and a convention center. Summarizing their visit, Todd and Anna conclude that the variety of activities available in Franklin— as Todd puts it, “We experienced everything along the entire spectrum of what you could do”—do not compromise but rather constitute the pleasures of what Anna labels a “wonderful quaint little town.” “So much charm and southern hospitality just exudes from Franklin,” she concludes. “It’s not just a place to visit, but a way of life.” At first glance, this episode of “Three-Day Weekend” appears as a totally incoherent narrative. Movements in time and space, both real and virtual, are radically disconnected. To the Carter house for treasure or to Nashville for trash; canoeing in “your own little world” or horseback riding to get “back to nature”; taking a trip “back in time” to the Civil War or back to “the 1800s” on horseback; consuming, in overtly commodified forms, spaces themed as “Indian” (both kinds), down-home, “western,” and southern—Todd and Anna are somehow placed in contact with it all. The gap between the Cheekwood estate (which closes the distance between Tennessee and the art worlds of the northern metropolis) and the

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Carter house (which instantiates a distinctively local form of authenticity—just try to find Civil War bullet holes in New York City) is passed over silently in a touristic world, in Elizabeth Bishop’s words, “only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and.’ ”42 But a world so connected is an affront to narrative, and, as it turns out, an affront to Todd and Anna as well: however capriciously, the episode recuperates disarray as a form of order. Anna uses “southern hospitality” and “way of life” to perform narrative work: she organizes and connects the couple’s disparate experiences by consolidating Franklin as an authentic southern place, not “just a place to visit.” To be sure, the crudity of this narrative is exacerbated by Turner South advertising, which invites viewers back next week to its (virtual) locality to have another heaping helping of southern hospitality, this one located along the Natchez Trace, where, according to the voice-over announcing the next episode, “the Old South is alive and ready for a drink.” (Onscreen, a woman offers a mint julep to the camera, affirming that “a mint julep is a sippin’ drink.”) Critically, we would judge Anna’s conclusion of a southern way of life as having a tacked-on quality. But whatever its aesthetic shortcomings, Anna uses the South to tell a story about her weekend, just as she uses her weekend to fabricate a location of culture. In its broad contours, as I hope to show in the chapters that follow, this logic informs as well more substantive and compelling narratives of cultural reproduction. Where everything in Franklin, however commodified, is retroactively subsumed as evidence of a “way of life,” Fred Chappell’s Look Back All the Green Valley performs a different, but no less common, form of narrative work: namely, in disavowing commodified forms of culture as fakes. During a trip to the mountains where he grew up, the novel’s protagonist, Jess Kirkman, visits, out of a “perverse mild curiosity,” a restaurant called Hillbilly Heaven where “toddies” are “gyarantee[d]” to be “untouched by Yankee hands.”43 Among the “the whistle-wetters you’ve been a cravin’ fer, neighbor,” the menu explains, are “Phoebe Redd’s Love Spell, Tennessee Deelite, Rocky Top Rumbustious, Mountain Dooley,” and so forth (94). For Jess, the commodification of the hillbilly stereotype constitutes an assault on identity: in a “darkened mood,” his mind “buzzing with language,” he wonders whether a soul-food restaurant might flourish in Minnesota by enjoining diners to “wrap yo’ honky lips roun’ dese yere collards these greasy greens, honky” (96). Dante, he concludes, would damn the proprietors of the restaurant to the eighth circle of hell, reserved for “those who perverted language” (96). But Dante’s word is not necessarily the last word. For one thing, the sheer awfulness of Hillbilly Heaven is perversely pleasurable to Jess: he enjoys navigating its excessive fakery. The waitress, once she drops the “shiny prefab smile” and “commercial effrontery” required by management, turns out to be a charming girl from Canton,

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Ohio, studying (what else?) anthropology and folklore at nearby Western Carolina University; moreover, she explains, the phony “hillbilly stuff give the customers something to chat with me about” (95). Locals, whom Jess assumes would be outraged by the restaurant’s stereotypes, “seem to like it,” according to the waitress, who adds that she can’t always tell the locals from the tourists (95). Look Back All the Green Valley embeds the restaurant’s anxious juxtaposition of culture and commodity within a narrative acutely engaged with such juxtapositions. As “the son who went searching for his father, just like the characters do in all those important well-received literary novels” (271), Jess visits Hillbilly Heaven while searching for his father in a particular way. In a chapter entitled “Backward in Time!” Jess retraces a mysterious map his late father had made of Hardison County, which consists of three subregions—Downhill, Vestibule, and Upward— clearly modeled on Dante’s Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. Jess ends up in Upward, a more literary “Hillbilly Heaven” whose creator, like the waitress in the restaurant, was born in Canton (North Carolina).44 For Jess’s father, Hardison County represents “the genuine old-time mountain ways and the true Appalachian temper that he thought were being crowded out and watered down by the exigencies of these later decades” (108). In this context, Joe Robert’s antipathy toward “Snuffy Smith” prefigures exactly his son’s antipathy toward Hillbilly Heaven. But neither father nor son is a true insider to this culture, and Jess worries that he has selfindulgently subjected his Virgil—Virgil Campbell, a central figure in the poetry of “Fred Chappell,” the pseudonym under which Jess publishes—to a kind of hillbilly stereotype not dissimilar from the “caricature of a mountaineer” in “lurid neon” outside the restaurant. “I was trying to see through the smoky focus of a literary lens,” Jess says, “fashioning [Virgil] into a symbol of mountaineer independence and rebellion against convention” (106). In what constitutes self-condemnation for his own perversion of language, Jess finds it difficult to untangle literary conventions (of the mountain rebel, as it happens) from those of the themed restaurant. For the critic, untangling Hillbilly Heaven from its knotty relation to Chappell’s narrative is no easier. Suffice it to say that consuming culture in the form of a Nowhars burger—“You’ll smack yore lips and say thar hain’t nary a better burger nowhars,” according to the menu (96)—organizes a moment, as “Wil Hickson” puts it in a simulated interview with Fred Chappell, “full of ironies about what we call nowadays the ‘inside-outside’ theme, that is, the difference between how Appalachian experience is seen by outsiders and how we folks who were born here experience it from the inside.”45 As detached from Appalachia (about which this project will have nothing further to say), the “inside-outside” theme often defines the work

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of authenticity under a regime of cultural reproduction.46 Even phoniness, as the waitress suggests, gives social groups something to talk about, while authenticity allows you and me to relate to one another as insiders. By contrast, that guy over there is just faking it; he wouldn’t understand; it’s our thing. As my final two chapters especially will show, the navigation of fake worlds, tourist traps, themed spaces, and built environments has evolved as a central theme of late southern identity. However hyper Jess Kirkman’s meal at Hillbilly Heaven, it pales in comparison with the sine qua non of the late southern hypermeal served at Turpmtine, Charlie Croker’s quail plantation in Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full (1998). Hardly more subtle than Hillbilly Heaven, the Gun Room at Turpmtine is elaborately themed— to the tune of 3.6 million dollars—with ranks of priceless shotguns, a vast hearth fashioned by Ronald Vine out of Georgia limestone, and a “Frieze of Unfriendly Beasts” replete with alternating rattlesnakes and boars.47 The “magic of Turpmtine,” as Charlie understands it, “depended on thrusting his guests back into a manly world where people still lived close to the earth, a luxurious bygone world in which there were masters and servants and everybody knew his place” (294). Unfortunately, Charlie deploys these effects in a farcically unsuccessful effort to attract the capital of Herb Richman. A Jewish fitness center tycoon and push-button liberal whom Charlie later introduces as “Hebe,” Richman, Charlie realizes, will be “a hard one to mesmerize with the magic of Turpmtine” (295). And so Charlie intensifies his mesmerism, demanding larger logs for a more visually stunning fire in an already-hot room, badly staging a virtual minstrel show from a faithful retainer whose children he has sent to Georgia Tech, and then encouraging the homophobic “humor” of the millionaire good old boys whom he’s invited as local color. Where the good old boys draw comic energy from plugging into the meal, the Richmans are merely shocked. Pulled aside by his second wife, who warns him that his efforts with Herb are going awry, Charlie partially recovers, only to err again by informing Herb that the quail “Oughta be!” delicious because “Each bird cost FO’ THOUSAND, SEVEN HUNNERT’N EIGHTY-FO’ DOLLARS!” (306). Crudely foregrounding the quail as an object of conspicuously conspicuous consumption, Charlie concludes, for the moment, his stunning ineptitude at his late southern potlatch. But the comedy of errors continues as Herb’s wife, Marsha, lavishly praises the black cook’s down home cooking and asks for her “secret.” The answer—“Welcome to . . . Grease”—is funny to everyone but Marsha, who “looked as if she had just been shot through the heart” (310). She looks this way because her effort at egalitarian appreciation—she wants to make a good liberal compliment, not reiterate the effusive, patronizing praise dictated by “southern” manners—is

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thwarted by the cook, who either shares the cultural style of her employer or simply recognizes the side on which her bread is buttered. Either way, the greasy greens stick in Marsha’s throat. Taken cumulatively, the scene is dominated by inept performances, dissonant environments, irreconcilable subcultures, unstable economies, and broken communicative circuits. Increasingly unable to command built environments, Croker progressively morphs into the late southern incarnation of Lucy Ricardo on the assembly line. Turpmtine, with its faux atavism organized around a “breathtaking” Big House that uncoils to the “true antebellum Old South,” unlike the “Greek revival palace[s]” of the “plantation parvenus” (86), cannot be updated or redesigned enough for its present purposes. The Ronald Vine Gun House will never attract capital flows from the likes of Herb Richman, who doesn’t like guns in the first place. Charlie commands emergent spaces no better than he does residual, redecorated ones: the Croker Concourse, envisioned as capitalizing on the new paradigm of the “edge city,” becomes Croker’s folly, a money pit that precipitates his economic decline.48 Repeatedly, Charlie mistakes his South for the real South, but in the end, he doesn’t know his places or his place. In the epilogue to A Man in Full, it is the black Atlantans who are able to maneuver among the heterogeneous microcommunities of late Atlanta, while Croker is exiled to Fox television—not even the local station, CNN—where he broadcasts stoicism, once an artificial but vital prop of plantation culture, to the virtual masses. Both Look Back All the Green Valley and A Man in Full, then, traverse what Patricia Yaeger calls themed spaces as part of their broader interrogations of how space itself is historicized, acculturated, traveled, commanded, penetrated, valued, and exchanged. Cultural terrains, which sound down-to-earth, begin to float vertiginously; the work of Hillbilly Heaven and Turpmtine is to keep culture in proximity to the ground. As Yaeger explains in The Geography of Identity, the theming of space as “extrinsically storied or narrated,” “precolonized and prefabricated around an idea or point of view,” “gratifies much more than a whimsical desire for homogenized, coherent space; it suggests a longing for incorporation, a longing to inhabit credible space. What does it take for space to be credible? In the absence of the support systems provided by communal life, costumes, props and crowded stage settings help, and thus a whirl of costume dramas and artificial backdrops have invaded our lives.” Linking the proliferation of themed spaces to deterritorialization and the severance of what “was once an unproblematic link between identity and place”—more specifically, to the “loss of ‘persuasive’ space that can guarantee solidity and solidarity or produce comforting ‘reality effects’ ”—Yaeger describes the broad logic of Disney World as embodying “the narrative problem at the heart of

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the postmodern commodity world: the prevalence—and the preposterousness— of inhabiting ‘themed’ space.” But in pondering why space has “become such an indispensable category of social and cultural analysis,” Yaeger solidifies time in order to interrogate space.49 As Johannes Fabian explains, what counts as “here and now” is based in the way “shared time and space are fused into identities we call community, society, civilization and history.” It is precisely what Fabian calls “received time-space fusions” that permit Yaeger to think about the once unproblematic link between identity and place and to conceive of themed space as a distinctively postmodern category of time-space fusion.50 I make this point for two reasons: first, because I share Yaeger’s premises almost exactly, and second, because her understanding of a particular kind of space as a narrative problem points to, even as it is embedded in a narrative of her own, the distinctive capacities of narrative vis-à-vis space. If, as an epigraph to Chappell’s chapter “Backward in Time!” maintains, “Time is Space,” then it becomes so only through the intervention of narrative, just as narrative structure underwrites Charlie’s fantasy of using Turpmtine to “thrus[t] his guests back into a manly world where . . . everybody knew his place.” What Yaeger alerts us to is the proliferation and commodification of timespace fusions as they are received, repackaged, and reproduced in the contemporary world. And yet literary narrative has, in ways I want to consider momentarily, been doing similar things for a long time. My understanding of the basic work of narrative in the age of cultural reproduction—that is, the story of narrative that I tell in this project—is not as a means to weld a discontinuous reality into a coherent whole, either spatially (as in Joseph Frank’s classic account of modernism) or temporally (as a sequence tending toward the condition of a grand narrative), but as a more contingent register of negotiating and reproducing reality’s seams as they are confronted in time and space— more specifically, in the received time-space fusion called “the South.” This is not to imply that narrative ever renounces its desire for utopian configurations of time and space—indeed, I accept without qualification Jameson’s insistence that narrative as a socially symbolic act invariably reproduces utopian drives—but that such configurations have trended toward miniaturization and, consequently, heterogeneity. What Fred Hobson has characterized as the loss of the “big novel” I view as the effect of a broad sociocultural trend that discriminates with increasing precision between big spaces that resist desire and smaller, more intimate ones wherein desire might operate as agency—wherein it might, indeed, find itself at home.51 (The grassroots utopianism of “Think Globally, Act Locally” reproduces this distinction while pretending to heal it, since it identifies the global as a sphere in which one cannot directly obtain agency. As an imagined geography, “the global”

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consistently recurs to a terrain controlled by the Other, whoever that is.) As Peter Brooks maintains, “narratives both tell of desire—typically present some story of desire—and arouse and make use of desire as dynamic of signification”; they “portray the motors of desire that drive and consume their plots, and they also lay bare the nature of narration as a form of human desire.”52 Narratives tell of, present, and portray desire even as they use and embody it, and in this doubling lies, I argue, narrative’s distinctive capacity to account, in the broadest sense, for desire’s operations as it is decoded, cut loose from more regulated forms of territoriality, and then reattached more tenuously and flexibly to themed spaces, localities, and artificial territorialities. If utopianism is understood, at its core, as desire’s relation to space, then how does desire locate itself in a world where space itself is experienced unevenly and unsettlingly? Speaking of the South today, I am inclined to heed David Harvey’s broader insistence that “it is hard to tell exactly what space we are in when it comes to assessing causes and effects, meanings or values.”53 This is not to say that such things aren’t spatially mapped—manifestly they are—but that remapping proceeds under the aegis of an imaginary irreducible to “common practice.” (More precisely, I should say “practices held in common,” since it is the collective, not the quotidian, properties of such practices that are attenuated.) Rather, the multiplicity of everyday worlds constitutes a kind of highly localized or microutopianism operating in smaller and smaller spaces, themselves perceived as more susceptible to design taken in its broadest sense. Harvey’s recognition that the home has evolved “into a private museum to guard against the ravages of time-space compression” has, for example, been thoroughly mined by so-called “reality TV,” which would doubtlessly offer the fourteenth way of looking at Thomas Sutpen as a happy one ending with the French architect and the well-appointed Big House.54 A similar dynamic is at work, I suggest, in the designer Souths whose narrative configurations we will explore in the following chapters, beginning with Tara, which strives to consolidate and refine a vanished way of life within a single estate. If, in 1941, W. J. Cash could plausibly offer his famous one South thesis; if, in 1937, Donald Davidson could plausibly refer to a “Southerntowner” who inhabited a local community seamlessly integrated within a broader imagined community, then the late South represents the deterioration of such coherently received timespace fusions.55 But the South continues to be offered, referenced, located, used. Narrative permits such pseudocontinuity even as time-space fusions are multiply received, improvised, and adapted to the contingencies of the present. In this context, I share Edward Said’s understanding of the conservatism of narrative form, which, he argues, “is on the side of institution’s preserving, transmitting, confirming not only the process of filiative repetition,” but also the “joining of people

Introduction

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in a nongenealogical, nonprocreative but social unity.”56 As I’ve suggested above, I see the work of narrative in the age of cultural reproduction in precisely these terms—namely, as producing nongealogical unities through the simulation of what Said calls filiative repetition. But here again, questions of desire collide with questions of desirability. If we understand what Hermann Lübbe calls “musealization” to encompass all efforts to prevent the atrophy of culture and memory, have such strategies remained segregated from everyday use or, as Lübbe suggests, have they “infiltrated all areas of everyday life”? In either case, is musealization experienced as an index of cultural pathology or of cultural health? For Adorno, commodification meant forgetting; can memory, then, operate through commodities and the forms of consumption they entail? (An expanded choice of cuisines is generally regarded as a good; why not an expanded choice of pasts, memories, and cultures?) And if musealization is itself, as Andreas Huyssen argues, “sucked into that vortex of an ever faster circulation of images, spectacles, events, and thus is always in danger of losing its ability to guarantee cultural stability over time,” are such guarantees desirable in the first place? Lastly, how does nostalgia—utopianism with a backward glance—function as both a discrete industry and a diffuse cultural practice in a South whose past is almost uniformly undesirable? Huyssen again: “Our discontents rather flow from informational and perceptual overload combined with a cultural acceleration neither our psyches not our senses are that well equipped to handle. The faster we are pushed into a global future that does not inspire confidence, the stronger we feel the desire to slow down, the more we turn to memory for comfort. But what comfort from memories of the twentieth century?!?”57 What comfort, indeed, from memories of slavery, Reconstruction, racial violence, Jim Crow, rickets, and widespread poverty? And yet nostalgia continues unabated as everyday practice and as industry, seeking out not only the detoxified Souths of which Andy Griffith’s Mayberry is representative but also, as we shall see, trauma itself in the multiple guises of the “good old bad old days” Tony Horwitz identifies in Confederates in the Attic. Embedded in all of these questions is the problem of the real: its recession and its recovery. I want to argue that distinctive capacities of narrative to engage such questions turn on a kind of Geertzian thickness, not only as regards thick description (as in Chappell and Wolfe, where themed space and their pure micronarratives are situated within impure and complex macronarratives), but also in relation to what I want to call thick utopianism, by which I mean the dense register of how desire flows into space, organizes it, is thwarted or gratified by it— ultimately, how desire imagines, seeks out, and connects with social domains. I should be clear that utopianism, in these terms, isn’t always pretty—that flows of

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desire through, in, and around discrete spaces are as likely to encounter resistance as gratification. Wish fulfillment in the novel, as Jameson says, is not available for the taking of a thought, while for Georg Lukács, the novel formally registers a world of blocked access, of man-made structures that no longer offer a pure return on the investment of desire. For Lukács, this generates the novel’s “special dissonance”: the “refusal of immanence of being to enter into empirical life.” The novel, according to Lukács, is simply “the art-form of virile maturity, in contrast to the normative childlikeness of the epic,” a break marked by Don Quixote and its acute register of the faulty seam between desire and reality, its formal recognition that the one can never fully penetrate the other.58 To the criticism that the novel’s highly artificial form clogs its access to the real world and the cultures and histories contained therein, I suggest that this artificiality provides special insight into a world where, as Appadurai maintains, imagination has infiltrated the quotidian. Lukács’s special dissonance, in other words, may not be so special anymore. Don Quixote is anomalous in his own time: for one thing, he can read about Amadis of Gaul; for another, he can afford to project fantasy onto reality. Today, these capacities are widely available. By a peculiar logic, it becomes possible to see the novel’s formal problems as permeating an increasingly wider range of social practices—vacations, restaurants, housing, entertainment, role-playing games—through which individuals build and negotiate quasi-social environments. It’s not only novelists and painters who generate what Roland Barthes called the reality effect, but interior designers, software programmers, restaurateurs, and Disney. Willingly or not, we suspend disbelief as a matter of everyday practice. What is a novel, after all, if not a low-tech prototype of virtual reality itself? Surely we are not far away from video games that allow a player to enact the classic Faulknerian scenario of Pickett’s charge; to tear violently, under the aegis of Sim Plantation, our own Hundred from virgin forest; or to manage, as a virtual Nat Turner, our own slave insurrection. But in even such fantastic narrative forms, I suggest, lies the capacity to record and transmit social values and meanings, to improvise and secure the boundaries of group identity, to fashion and mobilize what Appadurai calls the “diacritics of difference”—to perform, in sum, the work of cultural reproduction.59 Before turning to an analysis of how that work proceeds in a range of late southern fictions, I want to begin at the South’s most famous narrative fake: Margaret Mitchell’s Tara.

chap ter 1 tar a! tar a! tar a! Gone with the Wind and the Work of Cultural Reproduction

During the 1980s, as Ted Turner transitioned from covering Atlanta with billboards to covering the world with CNN—an effort that would culminate in the broadcast of the first Gulf War just a few years later 1—he insisted on having Gone with the Wind played, in what amounted to an endless loop, at the movie theater located at the CNN Center, a downtown mixed-use development described (in its earlier incarnation as the Omni International) by Joel Garreau as the very antithesis of the southern “sense of knowing where you are and who you are . . . quite literally knowing your place, both geographic and your position in it.”2 I begin this study by attempting to wrench what amounts to an allegory out of this scenario. The allegory is this: Gone with the Wind is a story about how the South finds its way through historical cracks and economic shifts by artificially reterritorializing place. To be sure, the South that survives is not the only South, nor does it bear more than a tenuous relation to any (real) South. Still, we can meaningfully say that at Tara, a South survives: even today, to say the word is to conjure something palpable. How it survives is another matter altogether. As fantasy? Advertisement? Mediascape? Themed space? Simulacrum? Utopia/dystopia? One irony here is that Gone with the Wind is a narrative about a realist par excellence and a story about the land—ostensibly down to the red clay. Another is that a novel universally characterized as idealizing an antebellum South never represents an antebellum South: page one of the novel begins on day two of the Civil War. Lurking among these ironies are the seams that constitute Tara as ground zero of southern cultural reproduction: the site at which the real South is simultaneously exploded and regenerated—re-covered and recovered, ad infinitum and in many respects ad nauseam—in what amounts to an endless loop. More precisely, Tara constitutes a persistent seam between an idealized South and a material one. In his tour of Atlanta in Confederates the Attic, Tony Horwitz undertakes an ersatz pilgrimage to find “the true location of the O’Hara estate”— to locate “where Tara was,” he explains to one man, “I mean, would have been if it were real.” Having already catalogued the usual suspects of Gone with the Wind remembrance—a Scarlett O’Hara impersonator beloved by Japanese tourists, the owner of the world’s largest collection of Gone with the Wind ephemera, the current

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owner of the papier-mâché Tara set used in the film—Horwitz enacts yet another attempt to materialize Tara, to make it real. As he comes to learn, however, Margaret Mitchell, “miffed that people were nonetheless determined to pin her fictional creations to firm ground,” had rendered his search pointless by intentionally jumbling the topography of her fictional terrain.3 One wonders, however, whether it was not Mitchell who labored in vain to protect her fictional ground from efforts to realize it materially: above all, the story of Tara records, in Emily Apter’s words, the “trajectory of an idée fixe or noumen in search of its materialist twin.”4 Apter is not, however, speaking of Tara per se, but of the fetish, and in reading the former through the analytical lens of the latter, I hope to account for what I regard as the narrative’s fundamental rearrangement of (southern) culture from a default condition coding and regulating desire to an object in itself desirable, if never fully attainable. The narrative work of Gone with the Wind produces Tara, I argue, as a kind of Lacanian objet a initiating a pleasurable path of “never-ending, repeated circulation around the unattainable, always missed object.” As Slavoj Žižek explains in his reading of Lacan, the objet a is “not a positive entity existing in space, it is ultimately nothing but a certain curvature of the space itself which causes us to make a bend precisely when we want to get directly at the object.”5 Transposing the Freudian/Lacanian conception of the fetish “geared to individual psychic structures, into the social arena,” Henry Krips argues in Fetish: An Erotics of Culture that the fetish is a “special instance of the objet a” in which “the subject more or less clearly recognizes the real source of his pleasure, and thus enters into an economy of disavowal.” Within this economy, the fetish acquires two analogues central to my project: the commodity and the simulacrum. Following Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism, Krips argues that the fetish “bears a structural similarity to the ‘commodity’ ” because “it is not only a concrete object but also a ghostly value, a false essence carried by the concrete object and constituted through the processes of exchange.” But because consumers treat the “value of a commodity as if it were a real, intrinsic property even when they know that it is an artifice created through the process of exchange,” the commodity “takes on the form of a simulacrum.” Just so, I argue, with Tara: no one ever fully buys into it, which is not to say that no one buys it. On the contrary, Tara stands positioned, as a kind of ur-simulacrum, at the threshold of the South’s entrance into the cultural industry and its subsidiaries—the heritage industry, the nostalgia industry, the tourist industry, and so forth—by distinctively mixing memory and desire. More specifically, Gone with the Wind enacts—and in enacting, constitutes—the commodification of southern culture, reproducing the South not as home (inhabited place), but as homesickness, as an object of nostalgia in both the spatial and tem-

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poral senses of the word. Circulating as such, Tara enacts the catachrestic logic of the objet a as, in Krips’s words, “a substitute for an object constituted retrospectively through the act of substitution” that, in turn, “creates the false impression that there was something . . . for which it acts as a substitute.”6 To be sure, Gone with the Wind is not the first text to conjure an Old South as nostalgic compensation for present deprivations. But no cultural text has ever done it better or more completely. Tara is the sim-plantation that all real plantations of the tourist industry strive to reproduce, an ineffable space toward which actual spaces of all kinds are mobilized, a platonic ideal that quotidian objects of all sorts, from wedding cake toppers to Barbie dolls, strive to represent. If, as V. S. Naipaul says, “Coca-Cola and Gone with the Wind are the two fabulous success stories of post–Civil War Atlanta,” it may well be that the fictional thing surpasses the Real Thing as an object of psycho-cultural investment.7 Read alongside other cultural fictions of antebellum remembrance, the striking innovation of Gone with the Wind lies in its split between cultural and individual investments in the “old ways.”8 In this context, the narrative reproduces a crucial property of the fetish, as William Pietz explains: “The fetish is always a meaningful fixation of a singular event: it is above all a “historical” object, the enduring material form and force of an unrepeatable event. This object is “territorialized” in material space (an earthly matrix), whether in the form of a geographical locality, a marked site on the surface of the human body, or a medium of inscription or configuration defined by some portable or wearable thing. . . . This reified, territorialized historical object is also ‘personalized’ in the sense that beyond its status as a collective social object it evokes an intensely personal response from individuals.”9 The intensely personal response evoked by both novel and film has been well documented, most notably by Helen Taylor in Scarlett’s Women: “Gone with the Wind” and Its Female Fans.10 (There are more than a few male fans as well, including Burt Reynolds, who, as we shall see, decorated his “Tara” with paired photos of himself and Rhett Butler.) As I hope to show, the individuation of memory and desire is modeled by the narrative itself: although Scarlett strenuously resists coercive projects of cultural memory, she ultimately plugs into a past and a territoriality of her own design. The crucial narrative work performed by Gone with the Wind is to sever desire from social regulation, even if (and this is no less crucial) decoded desire returns, in the end, to a second-order “culture” posited as a constellation of loose attachments to the South as home/land. In that return, we find enacted the praxis of Deleuze and Guattari’s artificial territoriality—or artificial Taratoriality, as the case may be—and precisely here, I depart from fetish theory’s reliance on the Freudian conception of desire as lack, and in particular its tendency to view

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the fetish critically as someone else’s perverse desire. In adopting an approach consonant with Žižek’s “practical fetishism” or Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence that desire produces the Real, I do not mean to sanction the uses to which Tara has been put, but rather to recognize in such usages the material effects of a distinctive machine of desiring-production—a recognition that will, in turn, suggest how Gone with the Wind broadly enacts the South’s shift from a production-based economy to one based on consumption and the flexible accumulation of culture. In investing culture itself as an erotic field—positioning culture as desirable, not as something one “has” by default—Gone with the Wind recovers the South as it re-covers it, burying it endlessly beneath surfaces that are, paradoxically, both impedimentary and constitutive. At Tara, there are no natives or insiders, only tourists. l In offering an explicitly schematic reading of Gone with the Wind, I both depend on and depart from Martyn Bone’s analysis of the novel in The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction. Observing that “Scarlett’s own ‘romanticized and false’ simulation of the Old South—her postbellum recreation of Tara as a site of neoConfederate remembrance . . . is mediated by a complex nexus of (as Frank Bascombe might put it) ‘socio-emotio-economic’ investments,’ ” Bone notes an apparent tension between “Scarlett’s bourgeois capitalist association with the material reconstruction of Atlanta, and her metaphysical romanticization of Tara as a remnant of antebellum life.” This tension is resolved, he argues, “because Scarlett embodies the New South Creed” wherein passive forms of remembrance coexist with the laissez-faire capitalism of an industrializing South. Given Bone’s materialist premises, Tara emerges as an inert “monument to the ‘old days,’ ” an “ideological fetishization of the antebellum homeplace as an old South haven” secured by “Atlanta’s profitable development that enables Tara’s survival (albeit in simulated form).”11 In contrast to Bone’s depiction of a parasitical relation between Atlanta and Tara in which the latter’s status as simulacrum marks an unproductive, counterfeit space, I suggest that the novel reproduces Tara as a site of productive nostalgia. In arguing that the narrative effects at Tara a transition from a site of cotton production to a site of desiring-production, I relocate the narrative work of Gone with the Wind from the New South economics of the postbellum period—or from the “boosterism” of Mitchell’s own time (another context in which Bone productively situates the text)—to the emerging culture industry economy of the 1930s. Given the unprecedented success of Gone with the Wind (both as novel and film) within that economy, such an argument might appear overdetermined. Still, I propose a causal

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relation between the narrative’s internal operations and its external command of an emergent consumption-based economy. Gone with the Wind teaches its reader to desire Tara by offering an account of how desire is artificially reterritorialized and rerouted toward culture from within a fluid and shifting socioeconomic field. At the core of this account lies what I want to describe broadly as a trajectory of economic dematerialization in which a stable system of exchange located in material things, concrete labor relations, atavistic circuits, and legible modes of production gives way to a set of increasingly speculative and flexible “socio-emotioeconomic” investments. Mapped against the convulsive trauma of the Civil War, this shift responds to the primordial loss of the Edenic antebellum Tara by substituting for it the utopian space of the postbellum Tara. The narrative present of the novel repeatedly mediates the oppositions—dispossession / repossession, old days / looking forward, “gone with wind” / “tomorrow is another day”—that describe and sustain these temporalized spaces in an effort to find a formula by which the one can be supplanted by the other (or better, how they might be ideally synthesized). Within this field of mediation, reality and fantasy emerge as key words. The problem for Scarlett is that, with the advent of “a brutal world . . . wherein every standard, every value had changed,” the new economics prove difficult to master.12 Bone’s metaphor of “socio-emotio-economic” investments is shrewd because Gone with the Wind operates three disparate economies: an economy of social capital, an economy of money, and an economy of desire (more explicitly, an erotic economy). For the moment, I want to defer discussion of the third in order to focus on the postlapsarian condition of the novel’s traumatized present, wherein economies are never synchronized and often operate at cross purposes. In particular, the narrative figures social and economic investments as antagonistic, repeatedly posing scenarios in which both Scarlett and Rhett must expend social capital in order to obtain money, Scarlett by consorting with Carpetbaggers and using convict labor at her mills, Rhett through a series of speculative ventures—Civil War profiteering, deals with Carpetbaggers, operating Belle Watling’s bordello—that cost him social status. Although Rhett is fully conscious of the costs, Scarlett represses them, persisting in her belief that money and the effects it can purchase will restore the antebellum harmony in which “appearances were enough”—when “the appearance of ladyhood won her popularity and that was all she wanted” (41). Rhett delights in exposing her fallacy, reiterating at every opportunity what he tells Scarlett at their first meeting: that she is “no lady.” For Rhett, that deficit constitutes Scarlett’s desirability: “ladies,” he says, “have seldom held any charms for me” (83). Still, Scarlett refuses to recognize the slippage. Even when her postbellum association with “Yankee ladies” (an oxymoron in the world of the text) turns public

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opinion against her, she believes that money can secure her status as a “great lady”: “she had no real desire to be unselfish or charitable or kind. All she wanted was the reputation for possessing these qualities. But the meshes of her brain were too wide, too coarse, to filter such small differences. It was enough that some day, when she had money, everyone would approve of her” (467). Before the war, everyone had: Scarlett’s deployment of appearances “was like a mathematical formula and no more difficult, for mathematics was the one subject that had come easy to Scarlett in her schooldays” (41). In the new postbellum math, however, things don’t add up: even Scarlett’s facility with figures figures as a minus in the social column, and her hard-nosed realism in the one economy appears as the most egregious quixotism in the other.13 The equation is inverted precisely for the counterpoint pairing of Ashley and Melanie Wilkes, the latter of whom, as Rhett reminds Scarlett on several occasions, is a “great lady.” The paragon of respectability, Melanie is the sole consumer of Scarlett’s display of postbellum appearances, refusing, even when Ashley and Scarlett are discovered in an incriminating embrace, to countenance dishonor. As Rhett explains, “There’s too much honor in her” to do so (649). The difference between Melanie and Scarlett is simply this: one is a real lady who dwells in fictions and the other is a counterfeit lady who deals in realities. The pairing of Melanie and Scarlett is structurally rich because it delineates the rupture that the narrative strives (through Scarlett) to heal: the tear between the old forms of the residual social economy and the new realities of the emerging money economy. Scarlett’s initial orientation toward this split is clear enough: she wants the money. With the devastations visited by war, Scarlett descends into the world of material labor and physical deprivation. Realizing that the “lazy luxury of the old days was gone, never to return” (293), she famously swears, “As God is my witness, I’m never going to be hungry again” (293). From this vantage, Scarlett’s contempt for Melanie and her cohort is absolute; she sees “only a silly stiff-neckedness which observed facts but smiled and refused to look them in the face” (419), a futile attempt to preserve the old forms by “silly fools [who] don’t seem to realize that you can’t be a lady without money!” (419). Physical hunger gives way to a more amorphous lack: “Harsh contact with the red earth of Tara had stripped gentility from her and she knew she would never feel like a lady again until her table was weighted with silver and crystal and smoking with rich food” (419). Soon after, Scarlett replays the scenario when she asks Rhett for a loan to buy her first mill. “Money,” she tells Rhett, “is the most important thing in the world and, as God is my witness, I don’t ever intend to be without it again” (434). Money will ensure, she explains, that she will have not only “anything I want to eat,” but also “pretty clothes” made of silk (435). What Scarlett

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fails to recognize, in a pattern that intensifies over time, is the slippage between what she desires and what money will buy. In describing this slippage, I return to the concept of the fetish—and more specifically, to the link between fetishism and utopianism proposed by Carol Thomas Neely—in an effort to understand how the narrative discriminates between productive and unproductive economies. Within Gone with the Wind, the word “fetish” appears only once in a passage describing how, for the women of Melanie’s set, the Lost Cause “was a fetish now. Everything about it was sacred, the graves of the men who had died for it, the battle fields, the torn flags, the crossed sabres in their halls, the fading letters from the front, the veterans” (608). Here, fetish objects are unique and self-identical, impervious to mechanical reproduction. Because they materially constitute what money can’t buy, they come to symbolize “what money can’t buy”—that is to say, the more diffuse properties of social life forever unavailable to new money. Because they are sacral and collective in character, they can be deployed to preserve a social order threatened by ascendant forms of culture. Such fetishes thus sustain a disciplinary and anti-collaborationist regime; not only do the women number Scarlett “among the enemy” since she has cast her lot with “the mongrel society” that has “but one thing [money] in common” (608), they reject even the Confederate veterans, the ostensible objects of veneration, because they are willing to compromise with the Reconstruction government (608). The unproductive nature of this fetishism is manifest throughout the narrative as sustaining an enervated form of nostalgia. Ashley Wilkes, whose self-described “shrinking from realities” renders him impotent to “face the new realities” (361), embodies the syndrome most purely. As the tough-minded Grandma Fontaine puts it, “We can lick ourselves by longing too hard for things we haven’t got any more—and by remembering too much” (496). What is perhaps less obvious is the unproductive nature of Scarlett’s fetishism, her worship of the commodity-fetishes that money can buy: silk clothes, silver, crystal, and (most egregiously) the Victorian mansion she and Rhett build in Atlanta—“just the kind of house,” Rhett pointedly observes, “that a profiteer would build” (602). Here we recognize an opposition between two forms of fetishism that correspond to the genealogy of the concept itself, which first emerges in the era of colonization to describe “primitive” objects with supposedly magical powers before being later appropriated by Marx to describe the “magical properties” of capitalist commodities that sustain false consciousness and occlude the theft of labor.14 In Mitchell’s novel, it is not merely that the one fetish has dialectically supplanted the other, but that they both constitute fundamental forms of lack, implicating, in turn, the failures of their respective economies.

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Rhett Butler figures centrally in this opposition because he is the only main character to participate in both economies, on two separate occasions shifting his allegiance from the money economy to the social economy. With the outbreak of the war (whose outcome he foresees from the start), Rhett declares that while “all wars are sacred . . . [t]o those who have to fight them,” they are “in reality money squabbles” (158). Predicting the later rhetoric of creative destruction, he capitalizes on his insight that although “there’s good money in empire building . . . . there’s more in empire wrecking.” “I’m making my fortune,” he declares, “out of the wreckage” (132–33). And so he does, not only through speculation in necessities (food), but in the traffic of luxuries, which conjure for those deprived of them a world gone with the wind. Rhett speculates irrespective of his reputation, taking in stride his social demotion from a “dashing blockader” with a “romantic aura” (153) to a “vulture and bloodsucking leec[h]” as Confederate fortunes decline. And yet, at the crucial moment, he enlists in the Confederate army—perhaps, he says, because of shame, perhaps because of the “sentimentality that lurks in all of us Southerners” (266). Whatever his motives, he quickly dispenses with such sentimentality after the war, conspiring with the Carpetbagger government to increase his wealth. Yet again, however, he swerves from adherence to market logic to reengage the social economy he has previously scorned. Attempting to “beat his way back to respectability,” Rhett tries to “cultivate every female dragon of the Old Guard” (626) with a “large, but not vulgarly large, contribution to the Association for the Beautification of the Graves of Our Glorious Dead” (628). Rhett subsidizes the fetishes of others to ensure Bonnie Bell’s social prospects—more specifically, to ensure that “everyone in the world is going to want her” (625). Even though Bonnie Bell’s untimely death makes this the only speculative venture of Rhett’s that doesn’t pay dividends, his investment in the “old ways” survives. In his final conversation with Scarlett, Rhett announces “I’ve reached the end of my roaming,” then goes on to explain, “I’m forty-five—the age when a man begins to value some of the things he’s thrown away so lightly in youth, the clannishness of families, honor and security, roots that go deep—Oh, no! I’m not recanting, I’m not regretting anything I’ve ever done. I’ve had a hell of a good time—such a hell of a good time that it’s begun to pall and now I want something different. No, I never intend to change more than my spots. But I want the outer semblance of the things I used to know . . . the genial grace of days that are gone. When I lived in those days I didn’t realize the slow charm of them” (717). Crucially, Rhett poses his repossession of the old days as less a recantation than a new pleasure. Orienting his new project around the fissure of appearance and reality—he wants the “outer semblance” of (among other things) “roots that go deep”—Rhett plans

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a neo-nomadic mode of travel: he will leave Atlanta—“too raw for me, too new” (717)—to tour places where he might extract the outer semblance of the old ways: Charleston, where he might “try to make peace with my people,” the “old towns and old countries where some of the old times must still linger” (717). Scarlett, too, has come to devalue much of what she has previously cherished: Ashley Wilkes, the accumulation of money, and her erstwhile friends “from God-knows-where who seemed to live always on the surface of things, who had no common memories of war and hunger and fighting, who had no roots going down into the same red earth” (696). In turning now to the integrated economy the novel finally imagines, we shall have to account for several oppositions that so far we have only posed as such: old ways / new ways, cultic fetish / commodity fetish, social economy / money economy. We shall also have to account for that red earth and the “roots” they sustain. l With characteristic insight, Leslie Fiedler describes Gone with the Wind as a novel whose “politics is embodied in an erotic fable.”15 In suggesting that the novel’s economics are similarly embodied, I want to interrogate how the narrative imagines Tara as gratifying flows of desire that are elsewhere blocked, dissipated, or directed toward objects that fail to return libidinal energy. That this is the narrative’s dominant configuration of desire is clear enough. With the exception of Melanie Wilkes, who, as an “asexual” and “androgynous angel” (to borrow Richard King’s terminology),16 hardly has any desire in the first place, not a single character in the novel gets what he or she wants. Melanie’s peculiar position in the novel’s erotic economy depends on her being self-identical, not constituted by a gap between appearances and realities that generate desire in other characters. For this reason, no one really wants Melanie, whereas Scarlett’s desirability is constituted by that gap— “the difference,” as Rhett puts it, “in what you look and what you really are” (435). Scarlett’s erotic longing for Ashley and Rhett forms a perfect chiasmus against their availability, a perfect symmetry of lack: “had she ever understood Ashley, she would never have loved him; had she ever understood Rhett, she would never have lost him” (718). In short, the narrative insists that you can neither be with the one you love nor love the one you’re with. Despite Ashley’s insistence that Melanie is “the only dream I ever had that lived and breathed and did not die in the face of reality” (703), the reality is that he desires Scarlett—“coveting [her] body,” as Rhett surmises (437)—and is kept from her only because of social prohibitions coded as honor. As Ashley himself concedes, Melanie “is the gentlest of dreams and a

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part of my dreaming,” while Scarlett is, he says, “too real” for a fellow who prefers “shadows and dreams” (362). At the moment Ashley becomes available to Scarlett, she no longer desires him, decoding him as a fetish gone bad, as “something I made up . . . . a pretty suit of clothes” (705). At precisely this moment, Scarlett understands the falsity of other objects and their ghostly values. Thinking back to her “spoiled desire for the aquamarine earbobs she had coaxed out of Gerald,” she realizes that “once she owned the earbobs, they had lost their value, as everything except money lost its value once it was hers” (705). Scarlett’s exception posits money as an erotic medium in search of an elusive object, and yet the very resistance of objects (including people) to erotic gratification indicates the fundamental lack at the heart of her various acquisitive projects. Perhaps no American novel this side of The Great Gatsby so rigorously aligns erotic pursuits and materialist ones. Considering the deep logic of this alignment, Žižek suggests that “sexuality is not a kind of traumatic substantial Thing, which the subject cannot obtain directly; it is nothing but the formal structure of failure which, in principle, can contaminate any activity.”17 Against the structural failure predetermined by this model, premised as it is on the logic of the “dreamed-of object behind every real object,” I want to juxtapose the potentially productive nature of such erotic investments (even as failures) by revisiting fetishism as something other than a perverse investment in arbitrary objects—that is to say, in a different way from how the concept appears in its three major historical articulations. Besides the primitive fetish and the capitalist fetish we have considered in passing, then, we shall have to consider the third (Freudian) articulation of the fetish as implicated in an explicitly erotic economy. Leaving aside Freud’s embedding of the sexual fetish in the scenario of castration anxiety, what emerges as useful in our present context is the process of substitution and amnesia by which fetishism operates, the logic by which the eroticized and arbitrary object “works” only if the act of substitution is repressed. As Emily Apter explains, Freud employs a “language of undecidability,” since the fetishist “seems to operate entirely in the realm of the simulacrum, generating a copy or surrogate phallus for an original that never was in the first place.” Following Apter, what I wish to borrow from Freud’s formulation is the “uneasy mixture of credulity and disbelief [avowal and disavowal] that typifies the fetishist’s attitude to the object-simulacrum.”18 By this point, it should be clear that the fetish toward which all this is leading is Tara. As Tara McPherson acutely observes, “From its early pages, Gone with the Wind stages an inevitable return of Scarlett to Tara,” to the “plantation home as an essential landscape of desire and escape.” For Tara survives where all other objectsimulacra implode; against the ephemeral quality of Scarlett’s other investments, it

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alone endures. In order to account for this durability, we must avoid being seduced by the novel’s presentation of the land as, in Gerald O’Hara’s words, “the only thing in the world that lasts . . . the only thing worth working for, worth fighting for—worth dying for” (24). Although Scarlett will explicitly endorse this sentiment in a passage we will consider momentarily, “the land” ultimately acquires a set of plastic properties that correspond to the multiple investments—and divestments— Scarlett makes in it. In a manner of speaking, Scarlett never steps on the same red clay twice. This is due to the intrinsic slippage between red clay as a fact of nature and “the land” as a fiction of culture. As McPherson observes, the novel repeatedly generates only to conceal such gaps in an effort to “naturalize the relationship between the earth (as nature) and the cultivated fields of the mansion.”19 Uncannily echoing Faulkner’s Ike McCaslin, Fredric Jameson identifies the fiction of land as emerging early in human history in the “peculiarly ambivalent mystery that mortal beings, generations of dying organisms, should have imagined that they could somehow own parts of the earth in the first place.”20 Early in the narrative, the alterity between nature and land is anthropomorphized when the “virgin forests” threaten the land “with soft sighs: ‘Be careful! Be careful! We had you once. We can take you back again’ ” (4). Although Scarlett’s effort to protect the land from reverting to a state of nature will later constitute something like a primal scene, the more fundamental point is that she has no qualms about ownership: the land is there for her to possess. The question then becomes which cultural fiction she is possessing at a given moment, and I hope to show that these fictions change over time, becoming less overtly “social” as they respond more intimately to her own psycho-erotic needs. At the same time, Tara is never severed outright from the social relationships that materially constitute it; it is only that these relationships are sublimated as the land assumes its final status as artificial territoriality. Scarlett’s recovery of Tara-as-home progressively filters or screens out material residues that clog its capacity to sustain desire. The most salient lacuna in her internalized account of Tara involves the labor practices of the plantation economy. As she returns to the ex-plantation in the midst of war and in a world wherein “every value had changed,” Scarlett rejects Rhett’s earlier pronouncement that wars are “in reality money squabbles”: Only her feeling for Tara had not changed. She never came wearily home across the fields . . . that her heart did not swell with love and the joy of homecoming . . . When she looked at Tara she could understand, in part, why wars were fought. Rhett was wrong when he said men fought wars for money. No, they

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fought for swelling acres, softly furrowed by the plow, for pastures green with stubby cropped grass, for lazy yellow rivers and white houses that were cool amid magnolias. These were the only things worth fighting for, the red earth which was theirs and would be their sons’, the red earth which would bear cotton for their sons and their sons’ sons. (298) Indeed, why wouldn’t one fight for such “beautiful red earth that was blood colored, garnet, brick dust, vermilion, which so miraculously grew green bushes starred with white puffs” (298)? In fact, there are several reasons, among them Scarlett’s stated indifference to the land when Gerald proclaims its virtues and her persistent disregard for her children. The scenario of passing down red earth comes before us, conspicuously, as a red herring. More scandalously, as McPherson observes, Scarlett erases the system of slave labor that “allowed Tara to ‘miraculously’ produce cotton in the first place” (51). The cognitive work that permits Tara’s reproduction thus removes the contaminants of (slave) labor and filthy lucre (Rhett’s “wrong” explanation for war). Ironically, however, Scarlett’s reverie occurs at the nadir of her return to the plantation. No longer the antebellum Eden that ensures Scarlett’s social and material privilege (an incarnation, to reiterate, that Scarlett barely values), Tara is, by this point in the narrative, a site of acute deprivation. Barely able to keep the household fed, Scarlett is only days from picking cotton, labor that even the “house servants” are unwilling to perform. Like the field hands who have deserted the plantation, she knows well that there’s miracle involved in growing. Under her fingernails, the red earth isn’t half so pretty; as the site of her own labor, the land isn’t half so miraculous. That Scarlett can, at this point in the narrative, tell herself the fantasy of “the red earth which was theirs” suggests that its value is impervious to material realities. Her reduction of Tara to desirable surfaces thus enacts what Jameson identifies as the capitalist strategy of aestheticization, which “seeks to recode or rewrite the world and its own data in terms of perception as a semi-autonomous activity . . . [thus enacting] a transformation into an art-commodity.”21 The narrative work of the passage above, in other words, is to detach the aestheticized surfaces of color and texture (softly furrowed acres, pastures green, and so on) from the realities of dirt, labor, and material production so that Tara might be recoded for use in pressing psychonarrative scenarios. More specifically, Scarlett’s recoding of Tara as an art-commodity provides it with an inexhaustible capacity to assuage her narcissistic wounds, the forms of psychological and material deprivation that her circumstances entail at any given moment. Tara underwrites Scarlett’s restoration to whiteness after doing the work of field hand; it underwrites her fantasy of becoming a “great lady” despite her

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public censure for being no lady at all. Tara compensates her (in a more explicitly erotic economy) for Ashley’s unavailability, since “not even Ashley could have filled the empty spaces in her heart where Tara had been uprooted” (367). Whatever empty space assails Scarlett’s heart, Tara promises to fill it. Most famously, it grounds, in an especially specularized incarnation, her project to “get Rhett back” at the novel’s conclusion: “she could see the white house gleaming welcome to her through the reddening autumn leaves, feel the quiet hush of the country twilight coming down over her like a benediction, feel the dews falling on the acres of green bushes starred with fleecy white, see the raw color of the red earth and the dismal dark beauty of the pines on the rolling hills” (719, 718).22 Again, the priority of color and sensation dematerializes and perceptually recodes Tara, investing it with the properties of what Michel Leiris calls the “true fetishism” of narcissistic “thingificiation,” wherein the “loving love of ourselves” is “projected from the inside out and clothed in a solid carapace, thus trapping it within the bounds of a precise thing and situating it, rather like a piece of furniture for our use, in the vast foreign room called space.” In “Women/Utopia/Fetish,” Carol Thomas Neely proposes that such specularity aligns the practices of fetishism and utopianism through their symmetrical “enumerations of sights/sites that screen out and suppress loss.”23 In scenario after scenario, Scarlett calls on the screen of Tara to perform just such work; just as often, Tara’s visual surfaces leave her “strengthened by the picture” (718). According to Neely, however, such specularity poses a problem of accessibility. Like fetishes, she argues, fantasy spaces protected from “the incursion of the real world” are likely to be “dissatisfying to outsiders while deeply satisfying to their makers.” In what follows, I want to consider how Tara, as a prototypical art-commodity, overcomes its spatial and cultural specificity to engage the more diffuse flows of desire characteristic of an emerging cultural economy—how, in short, it surmounts its potential for inert monumentalism. Because the specularized Tara does a kind of work, I argue, that the original plantation never could do, its entrance into the domain of the simulacrum does not constitute, as Bone suggests, a loss per se, nor does it place Tara in a parasitical relation to Atlanta capital. Rather, the narrative production of Tara situates the sim-plantation to perform the work of cultural reproduction, mobilizing an idea of a world gone with the wind even as it projects Scarlett forward to the promised land of tomorrow’s gratifications. Rather than reinstalling a disciplinary regime that regulates and construes social behavior, Tara acts as a fantasy frame that “possibilizes” an impossible structure. Despite having “cut forever any fragile tie that still bound her to the old days” (606), Scarlett can reattach herself to Tara through Mammy, “the last link with the old days” (718), and repair the tie. Although she

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never gets Ashley and even though Rhett doesn’t give a damn, Tara sustains her fantasy that “there had never been a man she couldn’t get, once she set her mind upon him” (719). Whereas the old ways narcotize Ashley (as a self-contained fantasy) from reality itself, Scarlett imagines her return to Tara with “the spirit of her people who would not know defeat, even when it stared them in the face” (719). Put simply, Tara rescues the old ways from an inaccessible yesterday and relocates them to an inaccessible tomorrow, thereby generating a kind of progressive, propulsive nostalgia. That tomorrow is another day comes to do essential work for Scarlett. In the aftermath of her miscarriage, she presses “her worries into the back of her mind with her old defense against the world: ‘I won’t think of it now. I can’t stand it if I do. I’ll think of it tomorrow at Tara. Tomorrow’s another day.’ It seemed that if she could only get back to the stillness and the green cotton fields of home, all her troubles would fall away and she would somehow be able to mold her shattered thoughts into something she could live by” (671). By this point in the narrative, Scarlett has already used tomorrow—her “old defense against the world” (671)— to defer thinking about her mercenary marriage to Frank Kennedy and, later, the abject condition of the convict laborers who work at her lumber mill (546). (Scarlett’s extraction of flexible labor flows seamlessly from the plantation’s dependence on chattel labor but requires no paternalist mythology of interdependence and consent.) Thinking about it tomorrow, an action increasingly associated with Tara, constitutes an ideal strategy for adapting to the contingencies of a market economy.24 Detached from the regime of material production, the fantasy of Tara ensures that Scarlett can function within that regime. In this sense, Tara acts as the kind of practical fetish Žižek describes that allows the “hardened, pragmatic realist” “to (pretend to) accept reality ‘the way it is.’ ”25 Rather than burdening Scarlett, Tara conditions her to compete successfully by deferring her articulation of “something she could live by.” (Contrast this with the Wilkeses, who already know what they live by and thus live in poverty.) Indeed, Scarlett is characteristically impatient with the old ways when they entail mere repetition or censorship. She repeatedly indicates her exasperation with those who “persist in making the gestures of the old days when the old days were gone” (414), especially when “people would go their ways as if the old days still existed, charming, leisurely, determined not to rush and scramble for pennies as the Yankees did, determined to part with none of the old ways” (418). With the fall of the Reconstruction government, however, the old ways become newly practical, as Rhett (ever the shrewd speculator) observes in time and Scarlett, who had “gambled on the continuance of the Bullock régime and . . . lost” (684), observes too late.

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Scarlett’s recovery of the old ways repeats the same peculiar combination of pragmatism and eroticized desire as her adaptation to the new ways. Associating Atlanta from the beginning with the erotics of the marketplace, Scarlett is initially “exhilarat[ed]” by its “crowds and its hurry and its undercurrent of driving excitement” that make it “temporarily even better than Tara, dear though Tara was” (103). This feeling survives even Sherman’s devastation when Scarlett returns to Atlanta to be “cheered by the sight of new buildings going up” (381). Her return to Tara is similarly eroticized, and not only because Tara locates her project to repossess Rhett. In deploying an erotics of culture—by which I mean not the regulation of desire by culture but rather the return of erotic desire to culture from the outside—the narrative replenishes “the old days” as a new object of desire, an object (like Tara itself) collapsed to aestheticized surfaces. If “glitter” describes the exhilarating surfaces of cosmopolitan modernity, “glamour” comes to describe the desirable surfaces of the old ways. In the end, as Ashley observes to Scarlett, glamour trumps glitter. Conceding that “life has a glitter now—of a sort,” Ashley continues: “That’s what’s wrong with it. The old days had no glitter but they had a charm, a beauty, a slow-paced glamour” (641). In this estimation, he is, as we have seen, seconded by Rhett. (Indeed, the superiority of the old days is the sole point of agreement among Rhett, Ashley, and Scarlett at the novel’s close.) If glitter sustains Scarlett’s fetishism for a time, glamour supplants it in the end. Finally, Tara alone can complete the narcissistic circuit of Scarlett’s loving love of herself, and can do so only because Scarlett is no longer culture’s interpellated subject, but rather its consumer. Like Rhett, who returns to recoup “the outer semblance” of the old ways, but with no expectation of submitting to the codes that had made him the black sheep of the Butlers, Scarlett returns to Tara unencumbered by disciplinary cultural scripts. As always, Mammy will do the work, but the work has changed. Whereas Mammy’s earlier job was to discipline Scarlett into a plausible simulation of a lady, her new labor is to link Scarlett to a plausible simulation of the old days. The crucial point to be made here is that culture can work this way only because it has been fetishized as a screen of eroticized surfaces. The Tara to which Scarlett returns in the end is not the one that she left, not the provincial backwater that temporarily pales in contrast with cosmopolitan glitter, but a post-cosmopolitan scrim of a newly sexy and newly “old” provincialism. For this reason, I suggest that Tara’s economic obsolescence—in the end, it’s a “two-mule farm, not a plantation” (699)—does not deplete its productivity, but rather secures its place in an emergent mode of production—namely, the reproduction of culturally themed, nostalgic space. Tara protects space from the brutal effects that, according to Jameson, result “from the power of commerce and then capitalism proper—which is to say, sheer

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number as such, number now shorn and divested of its own magical heterogeneities and reduced to equivalencies—to seize upon a landscape and flatten it out, reorganize it into a grid of identical parcels, and expose it to the dynamic of a market that now reorganizes space in terms of an identical value.”26 It is not that the narrative ever renounces its strategies of naturalizing Tara through recourse to “the land”; on the contrary, even Rhett is complicit in the fantasy that Scarlett is “like the giant Antæus who became stronger each time he touched Mother Earth” (671). Rather, it is that the specularized land is newly productive because it has acquired new values. Scarlett’s inheritance fantasy of the “red earth which would bear cotton for their sons and their sons’ sons” is precisely wrong because Tara is no longer a place (to adapt Andrew Lytle’s famous dictum) for growing rich nor for growing cotton either, but for growing memory. The paradox, of course, is that the narrative’s protection of the “magical heterogeneity” of Tara/the land is already preabsorbed by the market itself. In Tomorrow Is Another Day, Anne Goodwyn Jones concludes that “if there is a winner in Gone with the Wind, it is the ‘old days.’ ”27 I repeat this assessment with a difference: the “old days” win, but not because they defeat the novel’s main characters. Rather, they win because they generate, as a commodified and liquidated form of culture, new structures of socio-emotio-economic investment. Thus, I would emphasize differently Tara McPherson’s assessment that Mitchell “never shakes Scarlett free from her plantation home . . . or from a longing for the old ways. . . . [T]he novel finally secures Scarlett and the South within familiar stories and architectures, if for slightly different ends.”28 If Mitchell never shakes Scarlett free from the plantation, it is because she never fully possesses it: Tara, like the old ways themselves, recedes endlessly as an object of longing. Gone with the Wind bends desire toward familiar stories and architectures without ever securing them, and it does so by defamiliarizing them just so much—not in an effort to decode them or lay bare their logics, but to recode them as desirable. We’ve been investing in—and, as we shall see, divesting from—Tara ever since. l Given Tara’s anxious location in Gone with the Wind, it is hardly surprising that it continues to be resurrected and redeployed in later southern writing. In the remainder of this chapter, I trace some of the literary posthistory of Tara, focusing specifically on how later texts situate Tara on the seam of reality and simulation. Often that seam is figured as the threshold of emergent economies based on spectacle, tourism, image manipulation, built environments, and themed space. At the same time, as we shall see, writers such as Alice Randall and Alice Walker revisit

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the economy of traumatized bodies that operates silently in Mitchell’s narrative as a precondition for Scarlett’s command of fluid cultural and economic terrains. Before turning to these texts, however, I want to interrogate briefly the ubiquity of Gone with the Wind as a rewritten text. On the one hand, this is an altogether obvious matter: as both novel and film, Gone with the Wind ranks as the South’s most famous and widely consumed text, rivaled as a cultural export only by Elvis and CocaCola. It is hardly surprising that a text so dominant in what Pierre Bourdieu calls the field of cultural production should figure so prominently in the field of cultural reproduction, whether understood as false copy or guarantor of cultural continuity. On the other hand, Gone with the Wind is a curiously incomplete text, full of silences, lacunae, and a palpable deferral of closure. Tomorrow is another day, but tomorrow never comes. As we have seen, failure in Gone with the Wind recurs as an erotic lack against which various strategies of recovery and repossession are mobilized. Mitchell’s genius—and the formal property of the text that I argue compels rewriting—lies in offering a master narrative of acculturated desire, an account of how desire evades regulation by culture only to gravitate toward it from the outside. In precisely this sense, Gone with the Wind constitutes a massive effort to restore artificial territorialities after initially decoding them: it’s only after Scarlett evades the regulatory regime of the Old South that she can recode it as “home” and as “land.” This praxis makes Gone with the Wind the perfect capitalist text, since it not only enacts the logic of the emergent cultural economy but helps to ensure that the narrative occupies a central position within it. Not surprisingly, later writers more antagonistic toward that economy—that is to say, most writers—attempt to recode Gone with the Wind’s constitutive and compelling lacks as actual deficits. Within the field of cultural production, decoding Tara as a simulation has become something of a cottage industry. No writer is more explicit in this effort than Flannery O’Connor. In “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,” O’Connor gives us George Poker Sash, a 104-year-old Confederate soldier reincarnated as General Tennessee Flintlock Sash at the 1939 Atlanta premiere of David O. Selznick’s film. For reasons altogether overdetermined by O’Connor’s theological orthodoxy and narrative practice, the General is figured as the consummate fraud, all the more threatening because his deception is consumed as authentic. As the embodied presence of history at what he calls the “preemy”— despite the fact that he “didn’t remember that war at all” (135)—the General accumulates cultural capital fungible in the emerging economies of tourism and historical remembrance. He is “bundled up and lent to Capital City Museum” every year on Confederate Memorial Day, conspicuously displayed “when the old homes were opened for pilgrimages” (139). If, as John Desmond argues, O’Connor set

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her authorial task as the discovery of “ways to create the incarnational image” that would serve as the “medium of revelation,” Gone with the Wind simply won’t suffice as a template.29 The General’s epiphanic fraud is exacerbated by the sacred trappings that surround him as he is segregated from the history-seeking masses behind “a small roped area” (139), just as, at the premiere, ropes “keep off” the “people who couldn’t go” from the celebrities who can (137). O’Connor’s alignment of cultural icon and celebrity suggests roughly symmetrical forms of idolatry. As an “emblem” in Durkheim’s sense of a collective-producing icon, the General is (like Durkheim’s God) removed from profane space so that his authority remains pristine. It’s all a sham, of course, since the General’s authority derives not from real history, nor even from a film that’s already a copy of a historical fiction, but from the spectacle surrounding the film, a spectacle used, as Bone observes, to mark Atlanta’s emergence as a cosmopolitan and thoroughly modern capitalist city.30 For O’Connor, such secular gnosticism can only be understood as a perverse form of incarnation culminating in the logic of the brand, here signaled by the Coca-Cola machine near which she carefully places the General at story’s end. Because he embodies the idolatry of history as mediated by the simulacrum, O’Connor has, of course, first killed him off. Where O’Connor implicates Gone with the Wind in the idolatrous work of cultural reproduction, John Kennedy Toole reproduces the sim-plantation in an economy more susceptible to anarchic disruption. Midway through A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), Lana Lee, the “Nazi proprietress” of the Night of Joy nightclub, has an epiphany.31 Having “always enjoyed the theatrical aspects of her job: performing, posing, composing tableaux, directing acts,” Lana envisions how a lowbrow striptease performance might be reworked as a “nice, refined act” appropriate for her “class joint” (231). “Now see this act,” she tells the stripper: “You’re gonna be a southern belle type, a big sweet virgin from the Old South who’s got this pet bird. . . . We get you a big plantation dress, crinoline, lace. A big hat. A parasol. . . . You come onstage. The ball’s over, but you still got your honor. You got your little pet with you to tell it goodnight, and you say to it, ‘There was plenty beaux at that ball, honey, but I still got my honor.’ Then the goddam bird starts grabbing at your dress. You’re shocked, you’re surprised, you’re innocent. But you’re too refined to stop it” (232–33). The stripper’s (overdetermined) stage name is Harlett O’Hara. But if Toole reimagines Scarlett-cum-Harlett as a farcical version of what Betina Entzminger calls the “belle gone bad,” he positions his sim-Scarlett in a real economy.32 The first we see of the French Quarter, the novel’s primary setting, is neon signs and “taxis bringing the evening’s first customers, midwestern tourists and conventioneers” (29). The novel’s protagonist, Ignatius Reilly, labors in the

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tourist industry, selling Paradise hot dogs, while garbed in “an improbable pirate’s outfit, a Paradise Vendor’s nod to New Orleans folklore and history” (239). Tourists with “sharp Midwestern accents” beg him to pose for photographs (242). But participation within this economy is not limited to snapshots and passive consumption. For all his vocalized despair over modern deviance—its corruption of what he calls “geometry” and “theology”—Ignatius actively seeks it out. From a lady’s art guild that displays “paintings offensive enough to interest him for a while” (255) to a film whose work “undermining our civilization” leaves him “want[ing] to stay for another showing” (303), the cultural objects of a degraded world never fail to compel Ignatius’s attention. He seeks out Harlett O’Hara for an additional reason: he invests her with critical potential. Based on a series of misprisions, Ignatius believes the “real” Harlett to share his “Boethian” worldview (304), and thus likely to provide “some brilliant satire on the decadent Old South” (308). Then, too, she will be nude, and thus more readily available to Ignatius’s erotic fantasies, where “she would take a very stoic and fatalistic view of whatever sexual gaucheries and blunders he committed” (304). Ignatius indulges in a kind of second-order eroticism directed not toward the immediate object (the naked body of a counterfeit belle brought before the public by “Roberta E. Lee”), but to the imagined subject (the “real” Harlett: Boethian, satirical) behind it. Scarlett/Harlett thus stands (again) at an uneasy but compelling nexus of sexual and fiscal economies. In the carnivalesque, schizophrenic world of Toole’s narrative, desire flows unevenly, consistently flooding the conduits mapped by the normal economy and its structures of passive consumption. A Confederacy of Dunces is, at its core, a narrative of excess, of overconsumption. Whatever specific form it assumes, Ignatius’s pleasure constitutes anarchy in its pure form. Every system, every economy that he enters is thrown into disarray, from the department store at the novel’s opening, where he lashes a helpless policeman with a lute string, to the Levy Pants factory, where his Crusade for Moorish Dignity is undermined by a black work force fearful of police repression. Somewhat presciently in light of recent scholarly work on post-plantation black labor, Ignatius identifies the factory as combining “the worst of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis; it is mechanized Negro slavery; it represents the progress which the Negro has made from picking cotton to tailoring it” (130). A Confederacy of Dunces thus insists on the continuity of plantations old and new, a continuity that extends to the Night of Joy, where Burma Jones is forced to endure “modren slavery” in order to avoid arrest as a vagrant (143). Lana Lee, he explains to a friend, “ain exactly hire me. She kinda buy me off a auction block” (46). When he unwittingly suggests the idea of Harlett O’Hara, Lana forces him into the act as a “Real Old South” doorman, despite his resistance to

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acting as a “fiel hand out front” (234). In the best trickster tradition, Jones becomes the “most sabotagin doorman ever guarded a plantation” (253), vouching for “Miss Harla O’Horror[‘s] . . . guarantee one hunner percent real plantation dancing” in terms that guarantee its authentic plantation aura: “Night of Joy got genuine color peoples workin below the minimal wage. Whoa! Guarantee plantation atmosphere, got cotton growin right on the stage right in front your eyeball, got a civil rights worker gettin his ass beat up between show. Hey!” (338, 339). Even more strategically, Jones has ensured that among Harlett’s consumers is Ignatius, whose effect on the sim-plantation rivals Sherman’s on Atlanta. Jones recognizes what Ignatius himself does not: that Ignatius is more effective as an anarchist than he is as a revolutionary, more dangerous inside the economy of simulacra than he is on the outside as its pseudomedieval scourge. In his “Diary of a Working Boy,” a schizoid reworking of Horatio Alger, Ignatius writes, “I have always been forced to exist on the fringes of its society, consigned to the Limbo reserved for those who do know reality when they see it” (131). Ignatius is right, if not in the way he means: his pleasure constitutes the very nightmare of reality’s coders and commodifiers. Culture industry entrepreneur, pornographer, and neo-Nazi Lana Lee understands this intuitively: the Night of Joy cannot afford to let him in. (Her mistake is to entrust the boundary defense to a counterfeit field hand.) The durability and intractable nature of Ignatius’s anarchism is suggested by his fate: unlike an earlier neo-Scarlett, Blanche DuBois, who succumbs to that plantation fantasy of Belle Rive that is, in the end, only a beautiful dream, Ignatius lays waste to the simplantation. And unlike Blanche, who gets carried off to the insane asylum at play’s end, Ignatius has skipped town by the time the Charity Hospital ambulance comes, too late, to claim him.33 Like Ignatius, Dr. Tom More in Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins (1972) evades the trap of the sim-plantation, here figured more explicitly as Tara. Although biographer Jay Tolson claims that Percy was an early admirer of Gone with the Wind, by the time he came to write Love in the Ruins, his affection for Mitchell’s novel had apparently dissipated.34 (Despite Scarlett’s Catholicism—or perhaps because of her indifferent practice of it—Catholic writers seem particularly hard on her.) Tara is a trap for More because it is the home of virtuoso cellist Lola Rhodes, who, the previous Christmas, had joined Tom in the pleasures of gin fizzes and the flesh at the local country club. Lola’s father, Dusty Rhodes, explains to Tom early in the novel that he has left Tara to Lola; Tom, he suggests, should “do the right thing” and marry his daughter. None too subtly, Dusty accompanies his proposition with his “favorite music,” “Hills of Home, the Tara theme.”35 But Lola, like every third character in Percy’s fiction, is stuck in the Kierkegaardian bog of the aesthetic; more

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precisely, she constitutes that bog for Tom More. When, facing what he believes to be the impending apocalypse, Tom attempts to rescue Lola from revolutionary Bantu guerrillas, she proposes that they stay at Tara “and see it through, whatever it is” (279). “You know what I truly believe?” she continues breathlessly, “When all is said and done, the only thing we can be sure of is the land. The land never lets you down.” That’s true, I say, though I never did know what that meant. We look out at six acres of Saint Augustine grass through the silver rain. The great plastered columns, artificially flaked to show patches of brickwork, remind me of Vince Marsaglia, boss of the rackets. He built Tara from what he called the “original plans,” meaning the drawings of David O. Selznick’s set designer, whose son Vince had known in Las Vegas. (279) The movement of More’s eye is significant. Faced with Lola’s insistence that “the land” never lets you down, More scans to a landscape of purely decorative Saint Augustine grass, and from there to the house’s artificially flaked brick columns. Lola’s Tara lacks patina, the property of material goods by which age act as an index of value. As Arjun Appadurai explains, patina is a “slippery property of material life, ever open to faking as well as crude handling,” and the crudity of this fake is clear enough.36 Tracing the genealogy of the fake columns through the illicit economy of Vince Marsaglia to the Selznick movie set (itself “present” only through the duplication of scare-quoted “original plans”), before finally terminating in (where else?) Las Vegas, More decodes and nullifies Lola’s invitation to “come back to Tara. . . . Come back and put down roots with Lola” (281). Roots are impossible in a world of counterfeit surfaces. If, in the mixed-up, muddledup, shook-up world of More’s eschaton, Lola appears briefly as an exception—and More later toys with a scenario in which “if worst came to worst, she and I could rebuild Tara with our bare hands” (342)—the counterfeit utopia of Tara clearly marks her as the rule. Against dystopian terrain and impending apocalypse, Lola’s artificial Taratoriality constitutes but one of More’s faux-utopian options. Another is to hole up with Hester, a post-Puritan New Englander, in a Confederate salt mine. Another is to cohabitate with his occasional lover Moira at a deserted Howard Johnson’s, where More has carefully reproduced the aura and ambience of the old Auto Age. Fittingly, Moira works at the Love Clinic, where sexual research is facilitated by simulating “a particular concrete historical setting” (330). The pattern that emerges is the conflation of erotic desire and counterfeit historicity:

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More can envision himself in themed space precisely to the degree that he can sustain erotic desire for the woman located there. The narrative repeats the pattern with a twist when More marries the “dour and young and beautiful” Presbyterian Ellen Olgethorpe, renouncing (among other options) Lola’s house of pleasure for Ellen’s ethically rigorous household. If, at Tara, Percy exposes libidinal investment as moral deficit, demolishing Tara’s false edifice through narrative work, it is significant that More still inhabits themed space at the novel’s close—namely, the old slave quarters where he and Ellen live. “Constructed of slave brick worn porous and rounded at the corners,” More explains, “the apartments are surprisingly warm in winter, cool in summer” (381). Authentic bricks, their patina assured by actual wear, signal an authentic home, an option unavailable at Tara, HoJo, or at More’s previous house, where his ex-wife Doris “used to wax the bricks once a week”: “ ‘Annie Mae,’ she’d tell the maid, ‘Go Pledge the bricks’ ” (63). (Appadurai reworks the aphorism: “as for patina, our servants will provide it for us.”)37 Subtly but insistently, the narrative aligns bricks with interracial labor relations. Tara’s counterfeit brick and the Pledged bricks of home evoke the counterfeit domestic labor of Paradise Estates, where both Tara and More’s previous home are located and where, as More explains tongue-in-cheek, “faithful black mammies . . . take care of our children as if they were their own, dignified gardeners . . . work and doff their caps in the old style” (17). The satire here isn’t subtle, nor is the skewering of white political difference as More explains that Paradise Estates “liberals, arguing with the conservatives at the country club, say yes, Negroes are trifling and no-account or else mean as yard dogs, but why shouldn’t they be, etcetera, etcetera” (17). Inexplicably to the inhabitants of Paradise, the “faithful” black folk refuse to inhabit the Quarters, which Paradise developers have restored for them, even adding a chapel “so that strains of good old spirituals would come floating up to our patios in the evening” (99). The folk’s willingness to perform, it seems, only goes so far, since neither the chapel nor the “soft warm brick” nor the new tin roofs attracts the servants, who prefer “their Hollow, dank and fetid though it was” (99). As it turns out, however, they prefer—and ultimately possess—Paradise Estates itself, including Tara, inhabited at the novel’s close by Willard Amadie, former country club waiter and current mayor. But if Percy punctures the fiction of contented black labor, there is a disturbing irony in More’s possession of an authentic space, originally produced and inhabited by slaves, that the African American community itself repudiates as it ascends to social power. Like Ignatius Reilly, who frets that African Americans are willing to forgo authentic life on the margins to submit to bourgeois decadence, More privileges the earthy simplicity of the Quarters over the burdens of “civilized” life.

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At the novel’s close, it is the black community that simulates culture, practicing willy-nilly the faux-atavism of “Bantu” tradition even as they fake the dress and the jargon of British golf. Now, it is the Bantu businessmen who suffer from ulcers and hypertension (392), the “younger and smarter Bantus” who suffer from religious doubt, “having lost their faith at the Ivy League universities they habitually attend” (386). In such mimicry lies a kind of whiteface minstrelsy. As we turn, then, to two African American writers, Alice Randall and Alice Walker, who revisit Tara and the realities of historical trauma, I want to pay careful attention to how decoding proceeds, as it were, from the vantage of the plantation’s dispossessed. l In 2001, Alice Randall published The Wind Done Gone, advertised as the “unauthorized parody” of Mitchell’s novel. The publication followed a protracted legal battle in which the executors of the Margaret Mitchell estate sought, on the grounds of copyright infringement, a federal injunction over Randall’s use of Mitchell’s fictional world. There is a kind of fitting irony in the estate’s attempt to protect Tara in the domain of intellectual property, an overt concession of the logic Gone with the Wind both deploys and disavows: namely, that the real Tara isn’t about the land at all. Whereas Gone with the Wind sustains the fetish of Tara by occluding the slave labor behind it, the Mitchell estate effectively reproduced this logic in attempting to keep an African American author from visibly working at Tara. Reworking Jameson, we might ponder the mystery that “generations of dying organisms” should have imagined that they could somehow own sequences of words in the first place. The intensified efforts of recent decades to protect larger domains of representational “property” through copyright again suggest Mitchell’s prescient command of emergent modes of production. Indeed, one of the few points of consensus among critics of postmodernity is the identification, as Stephen Connor puts it, of “the new area of commodification for multinational capitalism as preeminently representation itself,” especially the “production, exchange, marketing and consumption of cultural forms.”38 As I have argued, Mitchell helped to generate this market by eroticizing culture as (specularized) commodity, thereby predicting in some measure the legal defense of her novelistic world as intellectual territory to be defended again invasion. On a more pragmatic level, the Mitchell estate had another motive in protecting Tara from a hostile (literary) takeover, since a decade earlier had seen the publication of Alexandra Ripley’s Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind” (1991). One wonders whether the estate was extremely ignorant of the late capitalist magic by which hostile action is trans-

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formed into advertising—surely the notoriety of the lawsuit increased sales of Randall’s novel—or extremely shrewd in recognizing the same thing: that the publicity surrounding the unauthorized sequel would rebound as advertising for the authorized franchise. Read alongside Ripley’s Scarlett, Randall’s The Wind Done Gone demonstrates, where Tara is concerned, a greater fidelity to Mitchell’s narrative than does its authorized counterpart. In Scarlett, Tara exists only so that Scarlett can leave it. This is true of both Taras, the plantation in Chatham County that Scarlett inhabits briefly, and the “real Tara” in County Meath, Ireland, near where Scarlett purchases and manages a country estate. Although Scarlett’s love of the land manifests itself sporadically throughout the novel—she comes, in fact, to “feel the glorious fact” of the Irish Tara, despite her initially muted reaction to it (“Um, yes, it’s very pretty”)—in the end, she doesn’t “even feel at home any more when I go to Tara” (that is, the one in Georgia). Rhett explains why: “You belong with me, Scarlett, haven’t you figured that out? And the world is where we belong, all of it. We’re not home-and-hearth people. We’re the adventurers, the buccaneers, the blockade runners. Without challenge, we’re only half alive. We can go anywhere, and as long as we’re together, it will belong to us. But, my pet, we’ll never belong to it. That’s for other people, not for us.”39 Adventurers indeed. In contrast to the banal nomadism of Ripley’s novel, The Wind Done Gone reproduces and regrounds Tara precisely in order to repossess it as cultural territory. For Tara’s exslaves, Tara—or rather, “Tata”/“Cotton Farm,” since Randall shrewdly detaches the house from the fields—is worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for. It’s not that the descendants of Africans appropriate an ethic Mitchell racializes as Irish, but that Gerald O’Hara, reenvisioned as “Planter,” is re-racialized as African. As Cynara, the novel’s narrator, explains, “There was always something African about Planter. . . . Even Planter’s love of the land had something African in it.”40 Whatever legal protections parody may have offered in the domain of intellectual property, Randall’s assault on Tara is hardly parodic, but rather frontal and overt. She displaces the fetishized surfaces of Tara with the defetishized surfaces of Tata, where “every column fluted,” as Garlic (Pork) relates, “was a monument to the slaves and the whips our bodies had received. Every slave being beat looked at the column and knew his beating would be remembered” (52). Here, specularized columns do not occlude the theft of labor but render it hyperlegible. Earlier, Cynara’s dream has explicitly decoded the commodity fetishes of the slave regime: “I heard planters speak of turning cotton into silver. Someone pronounced ‘alchemy of slavery,’ and a shining coffeepot, candlesticks, and saltcellars changed before my dreaming eyes into little piles of cotton balls flecked with seed” (10–

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11).41 Garlic reverses the alchemy by ensuring the memorialization of traumatized bodies; Tata is the product of his design. “There was no architect here,” he explains. “I built this place with my hands and I saw it in my mind before my hands built it. Mammy and me, we saved it from the Yankees not for them but for us. She knew. She knew this house stood proud and tall when we couldn’t” (52). A similar logic obtains at Twelve Slaves Strong as Trees (Twelve Oaks), where the twelve columns “stood for the original twelve dark men who cleared the land. And the lines, the flutes, on those columns stood for the stripes on those slaves’ backs. They didn’t know any of that, but we did” (55). Although the inside legibility of columns operates similarly at both plantations, the difference at Tata is that Garlic “pulled the string, and Planter danced like a bandy-legged Irish marionette” (63). The pattern here, repeated throughout the text, is to evacuate causal sequences operated by white agency and replace them with sequences in which Tata’s slaves exert what amounts to authorial control. Scarlett, reenvisioned as “Other,” becomes Mammy’s marionette: “Mammy used her, used her to torment white men. Other was Mammy’s revenge on a world of white men who would not marry her dark self and who had not loved her Lady” (54). Other’s desirability pales in comparison to Cynara’s; R. (Rhett) merely substitutes Other as a socially acceptable surrogate for Cynara, whom he later tries to marry. Violence itself is reclaimed as a black prerogative: Miss Priss poisons Mealy Mouth; Mammy kills Other’s three infant brothers because the slaves couldn’t afford a “sober white man on [the] place” (63). The Wind Done Gone thus moves well beyond decoding black consent to imagine Tara as a territory owned and operated by African Americans. This leads, however, to a double-bind, since their possession inevitably recurs to deprivation, trauma, and lack. Confronting her “slave fear,” Cynara meditates on the psychological residue of a slave economy: That old fear that should be getting old, turning brown and be easy to blow into the wind, is ever green like the earth is ever red. Garlic’s scared, I’m scared, that old fear that what we love might be sold: Mamas, Daddys, children . . . the place . . . a dress . . . anything we love. It’s an old confusion, people turning into things. When folks is gone (sold, dead, run-off), you got a corn husk doll, a walnut-shell ring, fingertips of dirt on the hem of a dress. It happened so much, maybe now things turn into people. The house, Tata—Garlic could hear it speak. All it contained of the brown lives it had eaten; it was a living thing. Garlic walks into the halls of the house like R. pushes in between my thighs; his eyes scream, “Sugar walls, sugar walls.” Everything sweats in the heat. Garlic

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won’t permit anything that might provoke Other to sell the place. Won’t put Cotton Farm at risk at all. It’s his sacred place. (85–86) The dense flow of substitutions—people turning into things, things turning into people—originates in the trauma of theft, enacting in reverse the trajectory of Marx’s commodity-fetish. But for Garlic, trauma is recuperated in an eroticized architecture that conflates Tata’s walls and Cynara’s vagina. The possession fantasies of both Garlic and R. position Cynara precariously—as an exile in the one case (she’s not wanted at Tata, since she might “provoke Other”), as a kept woman in the other. Ownership recurs to trauma; property itself is figured as traumatic. Thinking later of her relationship with R., Cynara realizes, “I have been R.’s, but no one had ever been mine. I have never possessed a man” (111). In the end, the narrative attempts to imagine what new forms of sociality might emerge in the aftermath of property and possession, in a time when “everything about ownership is changing: land, people, money, gold into foreign currency, foreign currency back into foreign gold, and gold back into money in our banks” (111). Finally, Cynara does not “wish to claim . . . a great Georgia plantation . . . where you measured wealth in red earth and black men” (195). Neither does she desire R., ever embedded in the regime of property, and so renominates him “Debt Chauffeur” (or simply “Debt”) when he asks her to marry him (158). The utopian move that breaks property’s deadlock involves production without possession: Cynara bears a child out of wedlock and leaves him with his father, an African American Congressman, and his wife, whose propriety and respectability will further his career. Leaving the child as a gift—“This is for you, my darling, emperor of the Congress of my heart” (204)— Cynara figures herself as Moses’s mother leaving her child “to float in the bulrushes” and, ultimately, to help set his people free. A postscript to the novel indicates the partial and deferred success of her project: her great-grandson is elected to Congress with campaign funds obtained by mortgaging Cotton Farm. The narrative work of The Wind Done Gone is thus, in several senses, to liquidate Tara, not only by detaching it from its territorial moorings as a guarantor of white southern identity, but by recirculating it within an economy of black ascent. By contrast, Alice Walker’s “A Letter of the Times, or Should This Sado-Masochism Be Saved” affirms Tara’s status as trap, even in simulated form. Cast in epistolary form, the story is presented as Susan Marie’s letter to Lucy, a white friend whom she had “snubbed” at a fund-raising ball inviting women to “come as the feminist you most admire!”42 Shocked by Lucy’s Scarlett O’Hara costume, Susan Marie traces her reaction to the “forced buffoonery of Prissy, whose strained, slavish voice, as Miz Scarlett pushed her so masterfully up the stairs,” she reports, “I

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could never get out of my head” (118). “Another reason I could not speak to you at the ball” (119), she explains, has to do with a class she currently teaches on slavery and God wherein she had required each student, after confronting the “real texts” of slavery, to “imagine herself” and write as “a ‘slave,’ a mistress or a master, and to come to terms, in imagination and feeling, with what that meant” (120). Concluding as a class that no one desired to be a slave, they are “surprise[d], therefore” to encounter a television special on sadomasochism in which an interracial lesbian couple reproduces both the hierarchical relation and the physical equipment of chattel slavery. To see “the actual enslaved condition of literally millions of our mothers trivialized” is shocking enough, but insult is added to injury when a white student, “apparently with close ties to our local lesbian S&M group, said she could see nothing wrong with what we’d seen on TV” (121). The narrative thus differentiates between two kinds of role playing—the one involving an “authentic” imagination of the realities of slavery, the other involving overt performances that either censor (since Lucy plays Scarlett as a feminist heroine, not as Prissy’s mistress) or recoup as pleasure (in the S&M couple’s presumably consensual relationship) slavery’s traumatic power relations. Even so, the story’s subtitle ironically references Susan Marie’s pedagogy as well, since she too forces her students to adopt the roles of mistress and slave. That they find it “extremely difficult” doesn’t matter, since “many fine papers” result from “hair tugging and gnashing of teeth” (120–21). The direct and unmediated experience of “God” generated by the exercise is thus perversely doubled by the lesbian couple, who “act out publicly a ‘fantasy’ that still strikes terror in black women’s hearts” (121). Whereas in the classroom such terror is recuperated as sublime, on TV terror is just terror. In the end, the problem is not that the lesbian couple trivializes the reality of slavery, but that they so effectively reproduce it. “We understand,” Susan Marie explains, “when an attempt is being made to lead us into captivity, though television is a lot more subtle than slave ships” (123). The simulation, it turns out, can’t be separated from the real thing, a logic that extends to Susan Marie’s reaction to Lucy’s costume: “Once seeing you dressed as Scarlett, I could not see you” (122). Their friendship will be restored, she writes, “because I will talk you out of caring about heroines whose real source of power, as well as the literal shape and condition of their bodies, comes from the people they oppress” (122). Endowed with a literal body and with social power derived from other bodies, Scarlett moves irrepressibly from the textual world to the real one. More precisely, she defines the seam at which the two cannot be distinguished. If “A Letter of the Times” constitutes an African American attempt to silence Tara and its textual reproduction of slavery, Kathryn Stripling Byer’s poem “Gone

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Again” (2003) shows a white southern woman extricating herself from Tara’s beguilements: I used to believe Scarlett would forever be standing atop that small rise of Georgia clay staring at Tara, intoning “Tomorrow, Tomorrow,” that sad pace of syllables . . . The speaker’s renunciation of Tara turns on her recognizing its textuality as “the old South / newly colorized, ready to hoodwink another generation / of belles.” Whereas Walker’s story suggests that there’s no such thing as just a text, “Gone Again” insists that there is and must be. The speaker can transcend the “gorgeous monstrosity” of Gone with the Wind—for “Miss Scarlett does not anymore stir / me into a passion of Southernness”—only because she recognizes its specularity. Stanzas 3 and 4, however, return to the speaker’s earlier habitation of the textual world as she “imagine[s] [her]self limping home” to Tara, “waiting for the moon to reveal / the house still standing.” Having “survived / such a journey and all for a lost cause,” the speaker becomes absorbed in the character of Scarlett: Standing there in the moonlight was our shining moment, unfazed by the real sounds of hound dogs and katydids . . . But if here imagination trumps reality, stanza 5 emancipates the speaker from fantasy: . . . Scarlett makes me feel tired—all those hours I wasted, enraptured by someone whose skin was pure celluloid, whose voice, when the reel came loose, jibbered like mine when I tried to pretend I lived just down the road from that movie set, cotton fields painted on canvas, the loyal slaves hoisting up sacks full of nothing but chaff for the wind, that old Hollywood hack, to keep blowing away.

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The speaker makes, as it were, “the real come loose” from Scarlett by flattening her to celluloid, thereby detaching her from the speaker’s identitarian scenarios. Although the “real sounds” of stanza 4 fail to disrupt the speaker’s identification with Scarlett, the reel sounds of the mechanical glitch compromise the raptures of celluloid and its capacity to sustain libidinal investment. Indeed, the entire terrain of the stanza has shifted from the “real” Tara to the reel Tara, the movie set with its painted cotton fields near which the speaker’s voice has strained, jibbering, to locate itself. In its final image, the poem restores what Walker’s Lucy represses but what Susan Marie insists is still violently present: the counterfeit image of the loyal slave. Rather than staging, as does the film, slave labor as a sign of consent, Byer suggests that the “loyal slave” is merely an effect of the movie set and its simulation of land and labor. The “loyal slaves,” it turns out, aren’t really laboring but only acting, performing empty work that hearkens back to the speaker’s own wearying labor to be Scarlett.43 l If the dominant literary labor of writers coming in the aftermath of Gone with the Wind has been to try to ensure the novel’s title as prophecy—to keep, in the words of Byers’s speaker, “blowing it away”—we should have to conclude that their efforts have been less than successful, not least because such texts must resuscitate Tara in order to kill it off. Plantation tourism, behind which Tara inevitably hovers as the fiction even better than the real thing, continues to flourish. Seventy years after the publication of the novel, an eBay search for “Gone with the Wind” typically produces in excess of two thousand hits, ranging from ephemera to dolls. Retirees in Rochester, New Hampshire, can live at Tara Estates Retirement Village, where “Mobile, Modular and Manufactured Home[s]”—known vernacularly in the South as “trailers”—are available at “Blue Book Prices.”44 As McPherson observes, Tara has accomplished what Lee never could: securing territory north of the MasonDixon. At “Tara—A Country Inn” in Clark, Pennsylvania, proprietors and “passionate Gone with the Wind historians” Jim and Donna Winner have, according to their website, “rewritten the book on Southern Hospitality—even visitors from the south are said to be impressed.” As well they might, with a seven course dinner available in Ashley’s Gourmet Dining Room, relaxation in Pitty Pat’s Parlour, a large collection of Gone with the Wind memorabilia, and an afternoon tea served by a hostess wearing an “antebellum” gown. According to the inn’s website, “As you set down your teacup, you reflect on the Tara that Donna and Jim have ‘written’— finding it hard to separate the fictional from the real.45 One reason this is hard is

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that it’s unclear where the real exists in the first place. Is the inn’s “time warp,” as the Miami Herald poses the scenario, “hurl[ing]” you to “the Old South 130 years ago or to David O. Selznick’s vision of it 50 years ago”?46 Is the “real” Tara the fictional space Selznick (or Mitchell) represented, or the actual one Donna and Jim have simulated? Ultimately, what seems most important is the reality you’re being hurled from: “When you need to escape the stress of your modern world, you’ll find the answer—and the place—in the words of Scarlett O’Hara: ‘I’ll think of it all tomorrow, at Tara. I can stand it then.’ . . . The Winners—true to their name—have won you over by making you feel fanciful.”47 Although even a cursory survey of such material is well beyond the scope of this project, I want to conclude this chapter with a brief consideration of a real estate development in Loganville, Georgia, where one can (literally) “Come Home to Tara.” With homes “from the 250’s” located on streets named after the novel’s characters, Tara Club Estates is, its website affirms, “where southern hospitality lives.” Advertised both as a “guard shack community” and “A Swim and Tennis Community”—at any rate, a community of some sort—the development offers tennis courts, a children’s playground, and an Olympic-size swimming pool. Responding to a decline in the jai-alai industry, the Florida Gaming Corporation deployed a logic traceable to Gerald O’Hara and purchased the development in 1999.48 Although one might be tempted to ask, as Shreve McCannon does of southerners generally, “Why do they live there, why do they live at all?,” the question merely reinscribes the external opacity of fetishism—more pointedly, its perennial status as the perverse desires of other folk. At the same time, Tara Club Estates’ manipulation of desirable surfaces certainly looks fetishistic in a manner that invites critique—not merely as regards taste, but the implicit forms of sociality embedded in its aesthetic strategies. If “you and I,” then, aren’t the kind of persons who would live there, I want to interrogate why some persons might. One answer lies in the development’s spatial relation to metropolitan Atlanta’s real estate market. Loganville lies in Hall County, an area currently attracting a kind of secondgeneration, exurban “white flight” coterminous with the emergence of the gated community. Demographically, the population driving this shift comes largely from neighboring suburban counties, particularly Gwinnett, where a laissez-faire approach to zoning during the 1980s and 1990s resulted in a proliferation of apartment complexes and starter-home developments that, over time, attracted lowerincome minority residents. If, as Robert Fishman suggests, suburbia constitutes a bourgeois utopian refuge from “threatening elements in the city”—a refuge “based on the principle of exclusion”—it may be that the exurbs operate similarly in rela-

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tion to the suburbs’ threatening elements.49 The appearance of “Tara” on the actual (although purely decorative) gate at Tara Club Estates subtly reproduces, as does the more pervasive linkage of real estate and “plantations,” the racial boundaries whose preservation drives that shift. It does not follow, of course, that residents of the development are intractably racist nor exclusively white, but rather that the development mobilizes implicitly white forms of desire. This alignment is further suggested by the development’s visual allusions to Gone with the Wind, allusions at once physically embodied and attenuated to the point of absolute simulation. Spatially, the development is organized around a Big House once owned, in a kind of exquisite irony given Tara’s close association with American film, by the actor Burt Reynolds. It was Reynolds, in fact, who named the estate “Tara” and decorated it, according to a 2004 article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, with “photos of Gable as Rhett Butler . . . paired with photos of Reynolds—as Reynolds.”50 Predating the development by some two decades, the Big House is a massive affair, starkly different from the Tara of the film and the more modest dwelling of the novel. There are six columns, up from Selznick’s four and Mitchell’s none. (Mitchell, in fact, strenuously resisted Selznick’s insistence on columns, which she viewed as violating the reality of Tara in its “actual” historical context.)51 Whereas both film and novel frame the house with trees—oaks in both cases, and an avenue of cedars in the latter—the dominant landscape feature of the Big House at Tara Club Estates is a massive lawn—if not the six acres of Saint Augustine grass at Walker Percy’s Tara, then at least three of well-manicured fescue. (If anything, Tara Club Estates simulates patina even more crudely than Vince Marsaglia.) Trimmed with metallic gold paint—latex gilt, say—it is precisely the kind of house, as Rhett Butler might put it, that a profiteer, or the “boss of the rackets,” or even an actor would build. On an allusive level, Tara has morphed into Scarlett’s Atlanta mansion. Visually, the Big House anchors Tara Club Estates, but as a privately owned dwelling, it is not actually part of it. Like Cinderella’s Castle at Disneyworld, whose soaring verticality is inaccessible to tourists, the Big House offers a purely specular grandeur. Architecturally, the Big House is connected to the development through the citation—the same spires, the same gold trim—of the house by the guard shack, which, like the gate, is largely nonfunctional since it is usually unstaffed. In what amounts to a simulation of enclosure, both guard shack and gate reference Tara by way of “placing” residents inside a distinctively themed space. That “Tara-ness” attaches itself to the center and the boundaries of the development—as well as its arteries, insofar as residents must traverse “Scarlett Way” on the way home—–suggests how even the most attenuated surfaces, strategically placed, might extend the work of cultural reproduction identified by Grace Hale, who argues that the white

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middle class of the postbellum South “insisted on conflating the plantation household and the post-Reconstruction white home in order to ground their own cultural authority.”52 If, then, Tara Club Estates fashions place using a distinctively late-capitalist set of tools, it also produces locality in ways that are recognizably archaic. In “The Production of Locality,” Appadurai identifies as “one of the grand clichés of social theory (going back to Tönnies, Weber and Durkheim)” the idea that locality “as a property or diacritic of social life comes under siege in modern societies.” Noting that locality is always “an inherently fragile social achievement” requiring careful maintenance (foundational rituals, ritualistic boundary defense, protection against entropy, and so forth) even in archaic and geographically isolated societies, Appadurai argues that neighborhoods, defined as “actually existing social forms” that realize “locality as a property of social life,” pose a dilemma that has intensified in the modern era. That dilemma—that neighborhoods both “are contexts and at the same time require and produce contexts”—frames with some precision the narrative work Tara is asked to do at Tara Club Estates: namely, to provide a context (however attenuated or compromised by simulation) that will serve as a quasihistorical frame within which a habitus or lifeworld might emerge.53 The development’s website suggests such a trajectory in organizing a series of photographs under three headings that read, from left to right, “Historical Tara,” “Swim Tennis,” and “Progress.” 54 “Historical Tara” includes photographs of those nominally historical sites we have considered: the gate, the guard house, and the Big House. By endowing the development with a mythological genealogy, these sites initiate a sequence by which locality—understood now as a place enclosed and oriented by a past—might be realized through social activities (swimming, playing tennis) available in the present and even extended into a future: under “Progress,” photographs show recently constructed houses and, finally, a bulldozer reclaiming the land as real estate. In what appears as a quotidian attempt to manufacture community, duplicated in various forms thousands of times in metropolitan Atlanta alone, Tara Club Estates cites Tara as a kind of instant context with the capacity to transform a development into a neighborhood—to endow it, in a manner of speaking, with an identity. As Appadurai suggests, the production of locality “invariably contains or implies a theory of context; a theory, in other words, of what a neighbourhood is produced from, against, in spite of, and in relation to.”55 In this context, as I’ve suggested, Tara potentially works in a number of ways: by referencing the perceived decay of neighborhoods from which potential residents might be moving, by promising a utopian form of mobility situated against dystopian forms (lower-income residents invading the old neighborhood), by alluding to a par-

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ticular cultural script by which an idealized and racially coded Good Old South is recovered, by mobilizing against the disorienting pressures of late capitalism the desirable social properties (hospitality, neighborliness, leisure, and so forth) associated with “old ways” (still) not forgotten. What is less clear is whether Tara Club Estates actually works in these ways. As even my brief analysis has suggested, I find such developments (in both the real estate and historical senses of the word) anthropologically thick in an almost Geertzian way: the real estate equivalent of Robert Pinsky’s suggestion that a shopping mall is somehow as old as Stonehenge. Paradoxically, this very thickness is constituted by thinness—that is, by the radically attenuated surfaces that reproduce Tara for contemporary consumption. Does, then, Tara still operate as a culturally legible fetish—that is, as a ghostly value attached to material objects and realized in processes of exchange—or has its excessive (and constitutive) visibility eroded such capacities? Although guests at “Tara—A Country Inn” are said to be “haunted in a simply charming way by the ghosts of Rhett Butler, Scarlett O’Hara and the other characters,” it is surely possible that some visitors remain impervious to such visitations, just as it’s not difficult to imagine residents of Tara Club Estates who view its Tara-ness as a joke, perhaps of the inside variety. Probably we would not want to say that a culture is reproduced at this development, but its reproductive logic clearly mobilizes an idea of culture—an ethnoscape, in Appadurai’s sense of the term.56 Lacking the kind of ethnographic or anthropological research that might respond substantively to such questions, any answers here must be largely speculative. What seems clear, however, is that Tara is still widely deployed, if on an increasingly miniaturized scale, in culturally coded efforts to recover “place” from what Jameson describes as the capitalist logic that reorganizes a landscape into a grid of identical parcels and in terms of an identical value. The irony here (as always) is that the recovery itself is market driven—a modular practice, Jameson would say, of producing difference in the service of global standardization. Tara isn’t what it was, but Tara’s never what it was: that is its constitutive condition. In the same way that advertising simulates aura in an age of mechanical reproduction, so Tara reproduces culture across historical and economic ruptures. In taking leave of Tara, then, to examine in the next two chapters broader narrative projects of mapping the South for cultural use, we should have to conclude that Tara endures and promises to do so for (at least) another day.

chap ter 2 pl ace into culture Tony Horwitz, V. S. Naipaul, and Travel on a Late Southern Theme

Tom Franklin begins his short story collection Poachers (2000) with a meditation that sounds familiar. “I left the south four years ago,” Franklin writes, “to go to graduate school in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where among transplanted Yankees and westerners I realized how lucky I was to have been raised here in these southern woods among poachers and storytellers. I know, of course, that most people consider Arkansas the south, but it’s not my south. My south—the one I haven’t been able to get out of my blood or my imagination, the south where these stories take place—is lower Alabama, lush and green and full of death, the wooded counties between the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers.”1 Here, “my south” recycles an old terrain for literary reproduction: however particular the local bonds between author and landscape, there’s nothing new about lush southern woods full of death, hunters, and storytellers. As a persistent location of southern culture, such woods have arguably produced more stories than game.2 Franklin’s literary relation to the land is an explicitly territorial affair: a matter of blood, filiation, and “being born there.” In contrast, Carmen Rivas tells about a different South: “My South has tall buildings and peach ice cream. In my South, we tell stories, and they’d better be good. In my South, cobbler is a dessert, not a shoemaker. In my South, the men still open doors and pull out chairs for ladies. My name is Carmen Rivas. My South is on Turner South. Turner South. Your South.”3 In this print advertisement from a 2004 issue of Southern Living, Rivas’s “my South” differs altogether from Franklin’s. (I except the mutual emphasis on storytelling, a point on which agreement is as conventional as the South’s being not just hot, but humid too.) The crucial difference is that the advertisement offers a conduit—Turner South— that connects Rivas’s South and your South. Turner South’s updated motto, “Find Your South,” goes this one better. As the interpellated subject of the advertisement, you, too, can tune in to peach ice cream and gentlemanly manners. As for Franklin’s South, you’d be a stranger there—not even the kind of exile who can’t go home again, as Franklin’s authorial persona turns out to be. This is because Franklin’s South is a territoriality in the old sense, a deterministic terrain that shapes filiation and feeling, blood and imagination. Endless substitutions are available in Rivas’s more flexible space: tall buildings are permissible, but perhaps

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not obligatory; pecan ice cream or plain peaches could easily stand in for peach ice cream. Modernity and tradition stand side by side. Being born there isn’t a requirement, a point suggested subtly by Rivas’s ethnicity, which lies outside the biracial parameters of the South many still deem “authentic.” Plug in to this South as you wish. Here, you’re welcomed, not regarded as a transplant, and you’re welcomed to partake of the gracious lifestyle of the southland. Back between the Alabama and Tombigbee, by contrast, lifestyle isn’t even an option. The irony is that Franklin’s South is no less susceptible to branding than Rivas’s, no less embedded in the economy of cultural production. Indeed, the literary market already has a brand—Grit Lit—ready to absorb this particular production. In a 2001 column in the Library Journal, David Hellman ranks Franklin alongside Harry Crews, Barry Hannah, and Larry Brown—the last described as having penned a “chicken fried Greek tragedy”—as practitioners of a genre that, like its eponymous foodstuff, is said to be “comfort food for those who love it, nasty and unfamiliar stuff to those who don’t.”4 But this comfort food can be an acquired taste for outsiders, too. Here we recall that the original outsider, the Canadian who’d have to have been born there but wasn’t, is already an eager consumer of southern narrative production, which he judges to be better than Ben Hur. If not being born there has rarely impeded the desire to read about the South, neither has it posed any special obstacles to telling about it. As a literary franchise, touring the South has been old business since the great travel narratives of the nineteenth century: Fanny Kemble’s Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation in 1838–1839 (1863), Frederick Law Olmsted’s The Cotton Kingdom (1861), and Edward King’s The Great South (1875), all of which appear in Robert Downs’s Books that Changed the South.5 The title of Downs’s book, however, is potentially misleading insofar as it pertains to literary travel, since the dominant effect of these works was to secure an image of the South within the national imaginary. As Eric Plagg shows in Making Sense of the Old South: Northern Travelers and the Coming of the American Civil War, antebellum travel narratives almost invariably worked to reify sectional difference, often through visual representations and souvenir practices that serve to match the South toured with the South preconceived.6 The self-fulfilling intentionality of southern travel, by which the South sought becomes the South found, repeats itself in the two narratives I consider in this chapter, Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic and V. S. Naipaul’s A Turn in the South, both of which prefer a South more like Tom Franklin’s than Carmen Rivas’s. In contrast to Turner South’s logic of connecting disparate leisure activities through the branding of the South’s “laid-back lifestyle,” Horwitz and Naipaul recover a South more readily imaginable as authentic and atavistic. Unlike Gone with the Wind, where narrative lubrication allows

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Tara to slide easily from a regime of material production to one of cultural reproduction, the dominant logic in these narratives is explicitly archeological, an act of uncovering what Naipaul models as a South of “layer upon layer”—a South, in other words, wherein the pleasurable surfaces of simulacra, strip malls, and Southern Living are stripped away to reveal the chthonic substructure of some more fundamental culture. Horwitz and Naipaul see what everyone else sees in the late South—high-rise hotels, strip malls, fast food franchises, and so forth—but their travel on a southern theme reveals deeper stories beneath. Together, these narratives trace, in Mary Louise Pratt’s words, “ways to move into and out of rhetorics of authenticity,” often by way of immersion in subcultures with which the author comes into chance contact.7 The worlds of the redneck, the tobacco farmer, Civil War reenactors, country music singers, and rebel flag warriors provide access to a foundational culture story, but they do so only because they filter out disorganized data as white noise. In particular, recovering the South’s deep structure requires the filtration of global market pressures, a preliminary move that allows the narrative digs to proceed in excavating a real South. In this effort, there are any number of circles to be squared. Like the travelers of an earlier age, Horwitz and Naipaul weld together a coherent South from disparate locales, and they do so in an attempt to fit the South within a broader cognitive map: for Horwitz, one organized around ideals of liberal nationalism; for Naipaul, around the residual geographies of the New World plantation. Both writers encounter space as an effect of traumatic scenarios linked, respectively, to the Civil War and to the regime of chattel slavery. In both cases, however, southern cartography proceeds according to subjective needs; both writers use the South as a screen for childhood obsessions, fixations, and psychological impasses. The South visited by Horwitz and Naipaul is characterized by touristic excess, having been exhaustively toured not only on foot and by bus but in print and on screen as well. Indeed, as far back as John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn (1832) one finds a simulated tour of plantation Virginia with strikingly contemporary overtones. Mark Littleton, the traveler-narrator of Kennedy’s novel, is instructed by the plantation master that the “annihilation of space, sir, is not to be desired. . . . [T]he home material of Virginia was never so good as when her roads were at their worst.”8 This early effort at time-space decompression points up a problem both Horwitz and Naipaul confront: whereas literary tourism in the nineteenth century surmounted obstacles posed by time and space, few such motives obtain in a world wherein images and information circulate instantaneously. If earlier travel writers had spatial access to what most readers did not—distant localities transformed, through the presence of an outsider, into a kind of mobile contact zone—

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then the postelectronic age involves, prima facie, a more diffused and deterritorialized form of cultural encounter. Here, I mean neither to pose in a naïve way earlier literary travel as merely documentarian nor to posit space as totally compressed by contemporary market capitalism, but rather to repose the question of what underwrites literary travel in a postelectronic age. Noting the “writing anxieties” occasioned by his project, Naipaul addresses the question explicitly: The land was big and varied, in parts wild. But it had nearly everywhere been made uniform and easy for the traveler. One result was that no travel book (unless the writer was writing about himself) could be only about the roads and the hotels. Such a book could have been written a hundred years ago. . . . Such a book can still be written about certain countries in Africa, say. It is often enough for a traveler in that kind of country to say, more or less, “This is me here. This is me getting off the old native bus and being led by strange boys, making improper proposals, to some squalid lodging. This is me having a drink in a bar with some local characters. This is me getting lost later that night.” This kind of traveler is not really a discoverer. He is more a man defining himself against a foreign background; and, depending on who he is, the book he writes can be attractive. . . . Generally, though, this approach cannot work in the United States. The place is not and cannot be alien in the simple way an African country is alien. It is too well known, too photographed, too written about; and, being more organized and less informal, it is not so open to casual inspection.9 Although we will have occasion to reconsider Naipaul’s disavowal of himself as a “man defining himself against a foreign background,” the problem he defines will resonate throughout our consideration of his narrative and Horwitz’s: how does one go about in a place that is “too photographed, too written about” (and, we might add, too interviewed)—a place that resists casual inspection? As the mayor of Selma, Alabama, tells Tony Horwitz, “Y’all always do the same, come in here smiling and then go home and write a dig about us.”10 At the same time neither Horwitz nor Naipaul encounters any shortage of natives willing to tell about the South. What characterizes these encounters is an intense awareness of their representational stakes, an awareness suppressed in earlier travel writing and in ethnography proper. These narratives, then, embody what Pratt calls the “arts of the contact zone”—and in particular, the autoethnographic text “in which people undertake

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to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them”—and they do so reflexively from both sides of the encounter.11 In a world wherein mediascape has always, already mediated landscape, wherein diffuse flows of information layer preconceptions upon stereotypes, it is no wonder that media and mobility inhibit what Naipaul characterizes as the casual inspection possible in the dark corners of the globe. But what, precisely, is being inspected? For both Horwitz and Naipaul, the answer recurs to an idea of culture mapped onto space and continuous over time. But just here I want to avoid reproducing their assumption of cultural solidity and continuity. If, as I want to argue, the cultural work of literary travel in the late South (with its good roads, easy travel, and “annihilated” space) differs from, say, the cultural work of a Fanny Kemble or a Frederick Law Olmsted, I want to interrogate further what “culture” is such that it is worked on, worked through, or otherwise used as a differentiated medium of literary labor. Indeed, it is precisely the premise embedded in such formulations—namely, the priority of culture to representation—that I wish to suspend in this effort. According to Fredric Jameson, “a ‘culture’ ” is nothing more than “the ensemble of stigmata that one group bears in the eyes of the other,” an outside-in proposition that must be “always rigorously unmasked as an idea of the Other (even when I reassume it for myself).”12 It is this dynamic, I argue, that characterizes the cultural fashionings of the postelectronic contact zone navigated by Horwitz and Naipaul, despite their practice of suppressing it as such as they recover a geological South of “layer upon layer.” But to entertain, even provisionally, Jameson’s model of culture is to recognize a shift from culture’s etymological roots in “cultivation” and the organic properties implicit therein. As Raymond Williams observes in Keywords, a shift in the meaning of “culture” initiated by Herder and subsequently appropriated by Romanticism emerges within two broad contexts relevant to this project: first, the proliferation of the term’s referents—not only to national cultures but to the variable cultures of social and economic groups within a nation—and second, the deployment of culture in opposition to the mechanical character of an ascendant industrial economy.13 This configuration of culture describes what one has by default—a way of life (practices, belief patterns, prohibitions, value systems, and so forth) one acquires by virtue of being born there, where “there” is explicitly spatial in character and implicitly resistant to market forces. But for Anthony Appiah, the deterioration of culture in this sense leads to his quixotic suggestion that “if we going to do cultural studies, let us at least do it without cultures.” For Appiah, the trouble with culture is that, “like the luminiferous ether of nineteenth-century physics, it doesn’t do much work.”14 The reason it doesn’t, he argues, is that it de-

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rives from identities rather than shaping or cultivating them. In The Ethics of Identity, Appiah connects “the thinning of the cultural content of identities and the rising stridency of their claims.” Despite antiglobalist anxieties over the homogenizing effects of importing Western culture, Appiah suggests that “among the most successful Western cultural imports has been the concept of culture itself”—a concept often redeployed, as Benedict Anderson argued of the nation, in projects of antiWestern resistance.15 Pondering in an earlier essay why “we have come to invoke ‘culture’ as the name for the gap between us here and them there,” Appiah offers as an explanation anthropology’s “professional bias toward difference,” since “Who would want to go out for a year of fieldwork in the bush to announce, They do so many things just as we do?”16 Although such an announcement would be similarly embarrassing for a literary travel writer (a point to which I return momentarily), the more cogent observation here is that Appiah’s discomfort with culture derives from its genealogical break with the “German notion of Kultur (which is the possession of a Volk, and which aspires to authenticity).”17 For Appiah, this rupture marks a culture that isn’t very cultural any more, thereby exposing “stridency” as simulation. It is in this sense that Horkheimer and Adorno pronounced that “to speak of culture was always contrary to culture.”18 Alternatively, culture can be understood as acquiring more prominent discursive and identitarian dimensions in the aftermath of modernity. As Jameson’s model indicates, culture understood as internalized stigmata would naturally intensify in a postelectronic world, where the virtual eyes of the Other are virtually inescapable. (Southerners know how they look on TV and, as Selma’s mayor suggests, in northern print.) Following Jameson’s concept of culture as differential, Appadurai explicitly refuses the nominal use of the word itself, substituting in its place “an adjectival approach to culture, which stresses its contextual, heuristic, and comparative dimensions and orients us to the idea of culture as difference, especially difference in the realm of group identity.” Reworking what, for Appiah, amounts to the fetishization of minor differences, Appadurai reconstitutes culture—or, as he prefers, the cultural—as the diacritics used to mark the “conscious and imaginative construction and mobilization of differences.” Although there is much in this formulation that I find attractive—most notably, its insistence on a post-substantial model of culture as “situated and embodied difference”— there are also grounds for skepticism, notably regarding his seamless transition from what he calls “Culture 1,” the “virtually open-ended archive of differences,” to “Culture 2,” the subset of differences consciously mobilized to articulate “the boundary of difference” upon which group identity depends.19 While Appadurai explicitly denies that he is reproducing a concept of ethnicity based on biological

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and genealogical criteria, it seems doubtful that the archive from which Culture 2 draws is even “virtually” open-ended. Instead, as Appiah suggests and Walter Benn Michaels has argued at length, culture understood as pure practice, as severed from the obligations of authenticity entailed in an ethnic or racial model of identity, are hard to come by.20 Although I return to the problem of culture in the next chapter, here let me make two observations that will orient our tour of Confederates in the Attic and A Turn in the South. First, both narratives register and implicitly sanction the obligations of authenticity entailed in a regional model of identity. For these uber-cosmopolitan writers, being born there, in the South, entails a set of imperatives deriving from place—that is to say, place is recuperated as culture in a genealogical, heritable sense. In attaching what Appadurai calls Culture 2 to some foundational reality, both Horwitz and Naipaul reproduce the narrative logics of their native interlocutors. But in transforming place into culture, they reiterate genealogies that are plausible but not inevitable, since they are equally legible as the play of cultural stigmata, mediated representation, and identitarian self-fashioning. Second, in repressing this contingent, improvisational dimension of southern culture, Horwitz and Naipaul deploy their own narrative logics of plausible genealogy. Travel premised on a late-southern theme not only presupposes but necessitates southern difference, since who would want to go out for a year of fieldwork in the South only to announce, They do so many things just as we do? In order for the South to be recirculated in the cultural economy, it must sustain a plausible narrative of difference, and not only that, but difference with a difference, since originality emerges as an authorial imperative. (Who would publish a book about the same old South?) Given the need for a southern thematics that is both old and new, intelligible and innovative, the strip mall can be encountered only as a threat to their respective narrative projects. And yet this set of circumstances generates, I argue, not merely (or not only) a distortive frame of reference. Rather, it synchronizes Horwitz and Naipaul with the diverse modalities of cultural reproduction, the means by which subjects and groups fashion identities out of a vast cultural and historical archive. Working the South, they register how the South works. l In Confederates in the Attic, Tony Horwitz travels south to the pre-mapped land of the “unfinished Civil War.” “Southerners,” as the book’s epigraph from Shelby Foote explains, “are very strange about that war.” Disavowing the logic of spaces connected only by “ ‘and’ and ‘and,’ ” Horwitz’s narrative relentlessly reproduces the

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Civil War as the central theme of southern history and the central structure of southern feeling. If, as Michel de Certeau says, “every story is a travel story—a spatial practice,” it is equally true that all travel gravitates toward narrative form.21 As Horwitz tours the South, causal patterns emerge as he deploys space and time in order to reach a particular conclusion about southern memory and feeling. Travel is arranged not only as a sequence of beginning, middle, and end, but as a series of causes and effects, discoveries and conclusions. What makes the text so rich in interrogating the work of cultural reproduction is that the effects Horwitz organizes in narrative form are often as starkly counterfeited as the world of “Three-Day Weekend.” Still, as we shall see, Horwitz’s route terminates in an atavistic culture uncoiling relentlessly to the 1860s and the traumatic rupture that has made southerners very strange ever since. Always lurking in Horwitz’s narrative, however, is a ghost text that says it’s all a fake, that the Civil War is not so much unfinished as it is conjured ad hoc as a screen for projecting acutely contemporary anxieties. Confederates in the Attic actively invites a reading along the lines suggested by Andreas Huyssen, who questions “whether contemporary memory cultures in general can be read as reaction formations to economic globalization.”22 Horwitz charts in scrupulous detail the effects of globalization, at every instance documenting the emergence of the southern McWorld and the Disneyfication of everything, including (almost) the Civil War battlefields on which Disney threatened to substitute “McHistory for the brutal reality of the Civil War” (217). For Horwitz, McSouth is illegible except as a compromised form of the real South he seeks to excavate. Contemporary Manassas, for example, known locally as “Manasshole,” is “swaddled by miles of housing tracts, fast-food joints and car dealerships” that, after bulldozing history, are “named for the history they’d obliterated: Confederate Trail, Dixie Pawn, Battlefield Ford, Reb Yank Shopping Center” (214). Following classic Adornian logic, such commodification is, for Horwitz, equivalent to amnesia. But the break between the Civil War and its contemporary uses is more than economic. Many active practitioners of Civil War remembrance come to their avocation in adolescence (often in reaction to parental authority) or in adulthood, offering any number of explanations for the war’s compelling nature. For every interlocutor who claims, as one woman does, that southerners remember the war because they grew up with family Bibles “filled with all these kinfolk who went off to war and died” (26), there are several others who cite distinctively contemporaneous reasons. For Mike Hawkins in Salisbury, North Carolina, researching his family’s connection with the Civil War helped him get his “life back together” following an ugly divorce (29). A terminally ill Vietnam veteran in the same town says that “the present . . . holds no

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mystery . . . the past does” (35). Rob Hodge, the hardcore reenactor who serves as Horwitz’s Aeneas in touring the lower regions, suggests that the “grim details of the War” cause you to “realize you’ve lived a soft life. I think we all have some guilt about that” (16). But for another member of Hodge’s Southern Guard, reenactment “is escapism. For forty-eight hours you eat and sleep and march when someone else tells you to. There’s no responsibility” (16). “I think there’s a lot of people like me,” he adds, “who want to get back to a simpler time. Sandlot baseball, cowboys and Indians, the Civil War” (16). This sentiment is later affirmed— and gendered—by a woman who claims, “It’s an era lost that we’re trying to recapture. . . . Men were men and women were women. It was less complicated” (134). For many others, the Civil War acts as a screen for more overtly political projections, from the wild-eyed white supremacists Horwitz encounters in Charleston to the more measured states’ rights philosophy of a man who visits Shiloh battlefield “because the issues are still here. . . . People still want to be independent of central authority” (174). On countless occasions, as we shall see, the Civil War is mobilized to generate the diacritics of group identities organized along racial and class boundaries. But whatever its stated rationale, the Johnny-Reb-come-lately syndrome complicates Horwitz’s initial model of southern culture, which posits particular structures of memory and feeling as a matter of heritage and acculturation— of being born there. Over the course of Horwitz’s narrative, the work of the Civil War emerges as a matter mostly of voluntary muscles—of reproduction as improvised remembrance, not of memory conceived in a continuous or heritable sense. In tracing, then, what Paul Wells calls the “contemporisation of a Civil War ethos as a mode of identity,”23 Horwitz must negotiate a tricky terrain where, on the one hand, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past” (the classic Faulknerian chestnut that Horwitz trots out as an epigraph for chapter 14), and, on the other, the past is bulldozed, marketed for tourists, conjured ad hoc, or otherwise compromised by the cultural logic of late capitalism. Like the archaeologist of privies in Charleston who prefers “the real thing” and laments that tourists are “turning this town into a fake” (61), Horwitz deploys simulation as a conceptual tool that divides real terrains from fake ones, although, as I hope to show, his discrimination between the two is often impure. As a rule, the presence of the market signals historical ground surrendered to the simulacrum. Like “Manasshole,” for example, Vicksburg has succumbed to the ravages of a late capitalist economy. Although Horwitz finds tourist literature claiming that Vicksburg is “a place where old and new blend in delightful combination like nowhere else in America,” he isn’t persuaded, observing that “history was proving anything but permanent,” while the actual blend of old and new is anything but delightful (195). Looking forward to

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the Vicksburg of Barry Hannah’s Yonder Stands Your Orphan, Horwitz maps a city of “cheap motels, pawn shops, check-cashing shops, J. M. Fly Rent-All, Dr. Junk’s buy-sell-trade!, Mrs. Harris Spiritual Advisor, and RV parks with streets named Double Diamond Drive and Avenue of Aces” (191). It is Atlanta, however, that constitutes for Horwitz the essence of the “antiSouth: a crass, brash city built in the image of the Chamber of Commerce and overrun by carpetbaggers, corporate climbers and conventioneers” (283). (A website for executives relocating to Atlanta offers supporting evidence with a different terminology, noting that “if you come looking for Tara, that old stuff is Gone With the Wind. Atlanta is real.”)24 In the home of Turner South, Horwitz visits a laser show at Stone Mountain where a collage of Confederate and American iconography collapses into “a puddle of political correctness” devoid of any “real content,” blended and “spew[ed] . . . across the world’s biggest rock” (288). The laser show epitomizes the “bland and inoffensive consumable: the Confederacy as hood ornament” (288). “Not for the first time,” he continues, “though more deeply than ever before, I felt a twinge of affinity for the neo-Confederates I’d met in my travels. Better to remember Dixie and debate its philosophy than to have its largest shrine hijacked for Coca-Cola ads and MTV songs” (288). Even Atlanta’s neo-Confederates commodify Dixie. Lee Collins, president of the Heritage Preservation Association, complains that “Southern culture . . . [has] been bleached from the fabric of America,” but he seems more interested in capitalizing on the “brand-new industry” of the “heritage movement” (289). According to Collins, Atlanta has failed to exploit the “natural resource” of “Southern heritage” (291). “It makes me sick,” he tells Horwitz, “the lost opportunity to capitalize on something we have. It’s bigger than oil because it’s inexhaustible and it doesn’t pollute the atmosphere” (291). Connecticut-born Soren Dresch, owner of the Edmund Ruffin Flag Company, identifies another market niche: the “void at the quality end of the market” for Confederate memorabilia. As opposed to the “tacky,” “Rednecky stuff” available when he entered the field, Dresch sells (for consumers with “Taste”) afghans made of “hand-loomed Carolina cloth” and flags hand-sewn by a “sect of Apostolic Lutheran women in the upper peninsula of Michigan” (294). In representing Atlanta as a discontinuous or maximally attenuated site of southern culture—the South as late capitalist simulation—Horwitz joins a number of other commentators, most notably Charles Rutheiser in Imagineering Atlanta and John Shelton Reed, who identifies Atlanta as “what a quarter million Confederate soldiers died to prevent” (283).25 Imagineered Atlanta contains an “astonishing crop of gated communities,” Horwitz observes, including one, Sweetbottom Plantation, that simulates “a bit of Old South grace transplanted to New South sub-

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urbs, with security gates and private roads” (286). What is less clear is the logic by which Horwitz privileges the real thing over the simulation. “Remembering Dixie and debating its philosophy”—the liberal scenario of civic discourse posited opposite “the Confederacy as hood ornament”—has elsewhere proven conspicuously scarce, while “remembering” Dixie has scarcely resisted conspicuous consumption. Earlier, for example, Horwitz has observed the t-shirt iconography of the rebel flag with the slogan “You Wear Your X, I’ll Wear Mine” that emerges as a countersymbol to the (black) “X” icon marketed in the aftermath of Spike Lee’s film (106). If anything, the integration of market practices and group diacritics is the norm, not the exception. What seems crucially missing in Atlanta is the traumatic residue of the war itself. In a city where, according to a local historian, “Atlantans leveled much more of Atlanta than Sherman did,” the self-inflicted “devastation” of historical space symptomizes a mercantile culture more interested in “rationalism and technological efficiency” (Michael Collins) and “market penetration” (Soren Dresch) than in old times not forgotten (284, 290, 295). More precisely, Atlanta seems more interested in selling bumper stickers that say “Dixie: Old Times There Are Not Forgotten” (293) than in actually not forgetting old times. As Gerald Johnson once put it, “There is no God but Advertising, and Atlanta is his prophet.”26 Horwitz’s mapping of the convention city is, then, doubly conventional, not only as pertains to Atlanta itself but also as it locates culture under assault in a globalized world. Like many others, Horwitz calls upon culture to mediate McWorld and Jihad—the marketplace and the tribe—by offering just the right amount of difference. (It is roughly in this sense that Appiah glosses cosmopolitanism, the most recent intellectual effort to adjudicate this polarity, as “universalism plus difference.”)27 Thus premised, Horwitz’s cartography nevertheless maps toward extremes: toward a South that’s too far gone to late modernity and a South that hasn’t gone far enough, a South of stultifying sprawl and one of crippling atavisms, a South of empty identities and one of excessive identities. Just the right South proves elusive. As Horwitz notes late in his narrative, “Though I’d often lamented the neglect of history in Atlanta and other places, I’d also seen how poisonous and polarized memory of the past could become” (334). And though Coca-Cola’s hijacking of the Civil War (in which one Real Thing simulates the other as a “bland consumable”) produces a “twinge of affinity” for neo-Confederates, elsewhere his affinity for neo-Confederates who had “walled themselves inside a stockade of their own creation and erected around it an ideological deadline” amounts not even to a twinge (330). Between the static pathologies of the walled enclosure and the nauseating liquidity of the laser show’s blended puddle—between, as it were, stockade

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and swamp—Horwitz searches for a stable ground of liberal exchange that might connect potentially insular spaces, but without collapsing into what John Egerton calls the “homogenizing purée” of post-diverse America. Because Horwitz’s spatial discriminations are based rigorously on how well a place uses the Civil War, narrative structure is predetermined: place is illegible except as an effect of memory and forgetting. But just the right memory proves as elusive as just the right South. As Horwitz quests for memory that will serve his agenda of liberal reconciliation and reunion, he firmly suppresses the counternarrative lurking everywhere in Confederates in the Attic: that history is the “effect” and practices of memory the “cause.” Atlanta’s anti-southern status thus acquires a diachronic dimension as a space where the Civil War isn’t unfinished, but long since forgotten. In Atlanta, the ascendance of commodity form and concomitant amnesia segregates the city from the real South’s historically stressed terrain. During a visit to Salisbury, North Carolina, by contrast, Horwitz hears in the catechism of the Children of the Confederacy “echoes of defeated peoples I’d encountered overseas: Kurds, Armenians, Palestinians, Catholics in Northern Ireland. Like them, Southerners had kept fighting their war by other means” (38). Later, a man in South Carolinian affirms that “the War is emotionally still on. . . . It’ll go on for a thousand years, or until we get back into the Union on equal terms” (67). But even here, the condition of armistice reiterates the contemporaneous motives driving the war’s “incompletion”: the war is “emotionally still on” because the enunciating “We” isn’t in the Union “on equal terms.” Since the trauma of the Civil War is itself inaccessible except, in the most tenuous way, through what Marianne Hirsch calls “postmemory”—a syndrome “characteriz[ing] the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are . . . shaped by traumatic events that can be neither fully understood nor re-created”28 —the “memory” of trauma requires the present nourishment of disadvantageous representation. Recalling Jameson’s definition of culture as “the ensemble of stigmata that one group bears in the eyes of the other,” the circulation of stigmata ensures the continuity of the grievance culture that, in turn, can be linked narratively to the originating event that (somehow) accounts for the deprivations at hand. Recounting a list of persons who evince the syndrome, Horwitz observes that the words of another South Carolinian “echoed the same sense of Southern grievance I’d picked up across the Carolinas. . . . In their view, it was the North— or Northern stereotypes—that still shadowed the South and kept the region down” (86). The felt presence of northern stereotype—“their image of me,” as one man puts it (85)—generates a kind of southern double consciousness sustaining emotional investment in the war. But Doris Sommer, observing that “double con-

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sciousness is a normal and even more universal condition of contemporary subjects,” voices doubt that most people would cure their double consciousness if they could.29 In turning now to a more detailed consideration of Civil War users, I want to pay careful attention to the psychological wages paid by this peculiar economy of memory. l In using the term “Civil War users,” I mean to suggest not only that the war serves as a kind of raw resource for cultural and identitarian labor of various kinds, but also that an altered state of reality characteristically accompanies such work. As Joel Bohy of the Southern Guard puts it, “the Civil War’s more addictive than crack, and almost as expensive” (14). As Horwitz explains, the Southern Guard’s hardcore style of reenactment, supervised by an “authenticity committee” that ensures the verisimilitude of its uniforms, strives for “a time-travel high, or what hardcores called a ‘period rush’ ” (7). “Sometimes after weekends like this,” another Guardsman relates, “it takes me three or four days to come back to so-called reality. . . . That’s the ultimate” (11). An escape from “so-called reality” underwrites less esoteric uses as well, not surprisingly given that the reality inhabited by most users isn’t especially desirable. But as with Tara, the fetishistic nature of investments in the war suggests that it functions less as a grand narrative than an objet a multiply generating repetitive and pleasurable “circulation around the unattainable, always missed object.”30 Whether through material objects, iconography, or the experiential immersion of a period rush, “getting at” the war characteristically involves movement toward a different order of reality that can never be completed. In this slippage lies a kind of identitarian bend, a curvature toward the past that, despite (or because of) its constitutive incompletion, generates the pleasures of identity and the solidarity of group effort. Put more concretely, individuals and groups exercise identity in the way that they reproduce the war, often by way of differentiating their usage from the fantasies, simulations, and false idols of others. In this sense, the Southern Guard’s construction of the “farb”—the “worst insult in the hardcore vocabulary,” used to designate reenactors who “approached the past with a lack of verisimilitude” (10)—is paradigmatic. Approaching the past properly becomes, then, a way to generate the diacritics of difference. What is astonishing is the sheer diversity of the usages to which the war is put. In Salisbury, North Carolina, Horwitz poses the question of why “memory of the Confederacy was so enduring,” and is told that “Southerners are a military people” (34). A woman in Charleston, however, operates a Confederate museum that feels,

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according to Horwitz, more like “a saints’ reliquary,” because, she explains, “I’m very anti-military. . . . That’s why I do this museum. Everything here is real. It isn’t television” (56). Still, her pacifist usage helps to generate a landscape of difference. Her South is a defeated territory set “apart from a nation accustomed to triumph” and thus “a little wiser and perhaps a little more considerate of one another” (56). The Civil War does similar pacifist work for a German who hopes that his reenacting will “ultimately buttress a pacifist message” (187). For Wolfgang Hochbruck, however, the message depends on simulation, not reality. Conceding that most German reenactors are acting out “fantasies of racial superiority,” Hochbruck speculates that “if we played at war more instead of really using weapons, our world would be a better place” (187). Back in Dixie, however, playing at war is often linked to fantasies of racial superiority minus the comforts of play, most horrifically in Guthrie, Kentucky. There, the shooting of a white teenager by African American youths angered by his rebel flag is re-scripted as the Confederacy’s latest casualty.31 Although, according to his widow, Michael Westerman wasn’t “into all the Confederate history and that” and flew the flag on his pickup merely “to make his truck look sharp” (110), the Sons of the Confederate Veterans posthumously enlisted Westerman as having “joined ‘the Confederate dead under the same honorable circumstances’ as rebels who fell in battle” (111), eventually installing an exhibit on the newest “Confederate martyr” in its museum in Franklin, Tennessee.32 According the SCV commander who memorializes Westerman during a Confederate Flag Day ceremony, Westerman “was simply one more casualty in a long line of Confederate dead of over one hundred thirty years of continuous hostility toward us and our people” (112). In this version of the unfinished Civil War, “our people” implicitly means white people. Several organizations that converge on Guthrie in the aftermath of the killing dispense with euphemism and circumlocution, among them the Klan—“my son just joined,” one woman reports, “and he’s a Grand Titan already!” (98)—and a newspaper called Confederate Underground, which “described Michael’s assailants as ‘menacing black gangsters’ ” (113). Summarizing the speeches by the SCV commander and others at the Confederate Flag Day ceremony, Horwitz concludes that “the Flag Day speeches weren’t really about the South, and Michael Westerman had metamorphosed once again, from a fallen Confederate patriot to a front-line soldier in a contemporary War, one that pitted God-fearing folk against what Michael Hill [president of the Southern League] called ‘an out-of-control government and its lawless underclass’ [my emphasis]” (113). Horwitz’s statement makes sense only if there is a real South detachable from the Souths explicitly mobilized in such rhetoric: the South whose “honorable” culture, according to a speaker from the Heritage Pres-

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ervation Association, is under attack from the “goose-stepping stormtroopers of the political correctness movement,” the South of Michael Hill that “represents the only remaining stumbling block to the imposition of an American police state” (112). These Souths, Horwitz suggests, aren’t really about the South at all, much less about the Civil War, but rather constitute simulated Souths deployed in contemporary campaigns of political and racial division. To ensure the legibility of these Souths as simulations, Horwitz turns to the retroactive Dixiefication of Guthrie itself. Historically, Horwitz learns, Todd County was predominately Unionist during the war, although through “an act of what psychologists today might term ‘recovered memory,’ ” the “locals had reclaimed a past of their own creation, in which Todd County was staunch rebel territory, a pastoral land of Southern belles and brave Confederates” (101). Among the cultural practices that consolidate this imagined past are an obelisk honoring Jefferson Davis (based on Todd County’s thin claims as his birthplace), a “Miss Confederacy” beauty pageant (wherein contestants are urged to “promote and defend Southern heritage” [101]), and, most controversially, the use of Rebel mascots for the local high school. Despite the iconography involved—Horwitz opines that the “flabby caricatures” of rebels “seemed to mock rather than exalt the Confederacy” (99)—local whites seize on it to mobilize a virulent race consciousness. At a school board meeting to discuss changing the mascot, Horwitz again detaches racial rage from the “rebel flag’s historic symbolism”: “The banner seemed instead to have floated free from its moorings in time and place and become a generalized ‘Fuck You,’ a middle finger raised with ulceric fury in the face of blacks, school officials, authority in general—anyone or anything that could shoulder some blame for these women’s difficult lives” (102–3). As with his detachment of the Flag Day Souths from the real South, the free-floating symbolism here signals a pathological scenario. While the specific diagnosis seems inescapable, I am less persuaded that the core logic of the scenario, in which symbols detached from “time and place” signal deviant group dynamics, is as well. This is not to say that it is impossible to discriminate among uses of the war, but that evaluations resist the ontological criteria Horwitz typically brings to bear in making them—that is, his characteristic deployment of “detachment” as a means of preserving the real war and the real South from practices too closely aligned either to Jihad (Guthrie) or McWorld (Atlanta). In fact, “recovered memory” and detached Civil War usages are the rule and not the exception. In South Carolina, a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens protesting the removal of the rebel flag “doesn’t know the details” of his ancestors’ participation in the Civil War, but adds that “that’s not why we’re here. This fight’s about today, about the ethnic cleansing of Southern whites—

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same thing that’s happening in Bosnia” (79). Like the women in Guthrie, histrionic claims of present “trauma” drive the narrative use of historical symbols. But for a New England–born member of the same organization, the flag is “not a symbol of the South” at all, but of “resistance against government control” (78). A third member named Walt, however, despite later conceding that “until they started criticizing that flag, I’d never given it a thought” (84), identifies himself as a “citizen of the Confederate States of America, which has been under military occupation for the past hundred thirty years” (81). When Horwitz visits Walt at his trailer, the CSA citizen explains how racist and anti-Semitic propaganda had organized his chaotic life: “I knew something was wrong but I didn’t know what. I blamed myself. . . . Now I’m not angry anymore. I understand why the world is the way it is” (82). Walt’s sense of a flawed reality wherein “something was wrong” is resolved when he learns that Jews (a “predatory race with higher intelligence than us”) control that reality, including the U.S. government.33 Interestingly, however, Walt’s racist conspiracy theories condition him to accept a low-paying job despite a “brain-poisoned” supervisor who “promoted blacks over whites and made Walt clean the bathrooms” (84). Visiting the factory the next day to test Walt’s “grasp on reality,” Horwitz observes him working cheerfully alongside a “militant NAACP member” and apparently relishing the role of the factory “crackpot” (84, 85, 84). If anything, it is Walt’s supervisor, James Padgett, who displays a sense of grievance over the habit of the “New York office” to look “down on me because of my hick accent” (85). Both Walt and his supervisor participate seamlessly in a late capitalist economy by ensuring (ironically enough) the smooth flow of media by reconfiguring cable boxes for pay-per-view use. From racist fantasies and imagined citizenship in the Confederate States of America, Walt is paid a psychological wage that compensates him, in classic Du Boisian fashion, for material deprivations as a nearminimum wage worker, while his supervisor fights a culture war of his own to persuade the New York bosses that “we’re not so dumb down here” (85). Here, we confront a scenario that recurs throughout Horwitz’s narrative: identitarian projects phrased in the most apocalyptic idioms fail to gain material traction as they are absorbed into the cultural logic of late capitalism. Typically, Civil War users make nothing happen, while Civil War reproduction (understood in its broadest sense) tends to exert a narcotic effect—either as an opiate, a means of recouping trauma as pleasure, or as a stimulant, an antidote to the banal psychologies of a standardized world. Scott Sams, another media drudge with a “pretty dull job” putting telephones in boxes, ritualistically returns to Shiloh to recapture the “incredible rush” of his first visit, wearing a costume and carrying a replica flag to

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get “deeper into the experience” (167). The neo-Confederate movement eschews hallowed ground for virtual terrain, taking its “culture war to the Internet, on Web pages called DixieNet, CSAnet (‘the E-Voice of the South’), and Prorebel (site of the ‘Cyber-Confederate Army’)” (386). Even the harder and ideologically edgier trend of Confederate remembrance is embedded in market praxis. From Soren Dresch of the Edmund Ruffin Flag Company, Horwitz learns of the ascendancy of Nathan Bedford Forrest over Robert E. Lee as the best selling t-shirt icon of the Confederacy (294).34 For “Southerners . . . tired of taking it on the chin,” Dresch explains, “Forrest represents the spirit of going after them with everything you’ve got,” a sentiment supplemented by Forrest’s “special appeal to workingclass Southerners” now able to go after them by wearing a Nathan Bedford Forrest t-shirt (294). Here we might reconsider the inertial properties of the market, typically configured in postmodern discourse as thwarting “good” revolution, as equally impedimentary to revolution of a less desirable sort. But even as culture war gravitates toward virtual terrains and the inertial domain of the market, it preserves a capacity to fashion and refashion the diacritics of difference. For every person who claims that “we shouldn’t make such a fuss about these old symbols. Forget it. There’s real things to worry about” (76), there are legions who insist that old symbols are the real thing: that they compel distinctive forms of memory, define meaningful identitarian boundaries, and maintain resonant cultures. Wearing an identity—as with the t-shirt slogan “You Wear Your X, I’ll Wear Mine” that Horwitz uses as a leitmotif—allows individuals to (literally) fashion identities difficult to distinguish from the real thing. This lesson is brought home to Horwitz at a 7-Eleven, where, wearing Confederate garb, he perceives hostility from African American shoppers. Since it is impossible to persuade them that he’s only simulating being a fake Confederate soldier—to “blur[t] out, ‘I’m just play-acting,’ or ‘It’s only a game’ ” (144)—he resolves henceforth to “be true to my views” by play-acting only as a fake Union soldier. The 7-Eleven incident also locates Horwitz’s critique of reenactment as offering a “grand spectacle” of bland reconciliation rather than probing the scars of a “heterogeneous society still raw with historic wounds and racial sensitivities” (144). Later, Wolfgang Hochbruck counters Horwitz’s critique by suggesting that “Civil War remembrance reflects a movement toward more civility and peace.” “In reenactments,” Hochbruck explains, “North and South get along, they work together” (187). Attempting to negotiate bland civility and atavistic antagonism, empty consensus and deeply felt division, Horwitz finds little civic ground to navigate. If healing is the metaphor toward which his narrative strives, Stone Mountain’s antiseptic laser show won’t do, nor will the iconic fundamentalism that re-

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circulates trauma as pleasure. As one rebel flag supporter puts it, “We may have lost the War, but at least we should have this to look back on,” a “wistful logic” Horwitz acutely decodes as “the Cause was lost but the Lost Cause shouldn’t be” (79). (Here we confront the paradox of trauma itself: its intensive narrative structure makes it especially effective at securing group identity.) Looked at another way, however, the opposition between bland civility and meaningful division dissolves when we recognize that both sets of practices work to maintain an equilibrium according to the logics of the mass market and the niche market, respectively. Continually frustrated in his efforts to locate a “model for understanding our common history” (330), Horwitz finds instead highly differentiated ways of plugging into the Civil War that reproduce narrow and increasingly racialized identities. “Everywhere,” he writes, “I had to explore two pasts and two presents; one white, one black, separate and unreconcilable. The past had poisoned the present and the present, in turn, now poisoned remembrance of things past. . . . The best that could be hoped for was a grudging toleration of each other’s historical memory. You Wear Your X, I’ll Wear Mine” (208). Within history’s tribal doublebind, however, Horwitz subtly privileges a determinist model in which the past poisons before the present does. According to Žižek, however, the primordial nature of social antagonism requires the intervention of narratives that resolve “some fundamental antagonism by rearranging its terms into a temporal succession,” thereby replenishing jouissance, or rather accounting for its lack through recourse to a scapegoat who has “stolen” it.35 Horwitz comes closest to this point of view, however, in his consideration of African American memory. Noting on several occasions the disconnection of African Americans from the structures of Civil War remembrance, Horwitz encounters in Selma, Alabama, practices of black memory attached similarly to the Civil Rights movement. Just as a white tourist at Shiloh wistfully conjures an era when his “great-great-grandpappy . . . . didn’t have to pay phone bills, put gas in the car, worry about crime. And he knew what he was living for” (133), so the black residents of Selma conjure the era of the Pettus Bridge clash, bus boycotts, and Rosa Parks—the “good old days,” according to the Reverend Richard Boone, when “everything was clear, black and white” (362). Similarly, Rose Sanders, who refuses to attend Selma’s Civil War reenactment because “only a few whites come to our bridge reenactment” (368), looks to Selma’s voting rights museum to “add some clarity to history, or at least to remember a time when there was some clarity. . . . It’s gotten so complicated ever since” (369). Horwitz probes the similarities: “The civil rights celebrants seemed caught in the same ghost dance as so many whites I’d met, conjuring spirits from an exalted past of heroic sacrifice, halo-crowned martyrs, and unfulfilled dreams” (363). The antagonistic (and ex-

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plicitly primitivist) metaphor of conjuring spirits, however, is new. Where the civil rights era is concerned, the trope of detachment and temporal discontinuity does not signal (as in Guthrie) the corruption of potentially valid forms of remembrance, but constitutes the very condition of memory itself. Given such asymmetries, we might inquire further as to what forms of memory past muster. In the end, few do, as Horwitz’s quest for just the right memory circulates pleasurably around the always unattainable object of remembrance itself, doubling in an uncanny way Rob Hodge’s materialist search “for the Holy Grail . . . [of] a bit of gray cloth with just the right amount of dye and the exact number of threads” (388). Although Hodge’s politically ambiguous form of remembrance perhaps comes closest to Horwitz’s ideal, it is less capacious than Horwitz’s utopian quest for remembrance impervious to market colonization and neo-tribal filiation. As we have seen, Atlanta embodies the market’s colonization of the South as the anti-South. Still, Horwitz grudgingly concedes Atlanta’s “comparative racial amity,” a property he links to the city’s “ceaseless peddling of its progressive image.” Atlanta’s self-fashioning, in turn, correlates to its “neglect of its past” that includes, among other “Orwellian” practices, barring Confederate reenactors from a historical festival surrounding the 1996 Olympics (285). (One wonders whether “comparative racial amity” isn’t worth such neglect.)36 In Andersonville, Georgia, by contrast, the past is memorialized with a vengeance, confronting Horwitz with an absolute impasse to his fantasy of liberal nationalism. At Andersonville, he uncovers the “exceptionally quixotic mission, notwithstanding the South’s passion for lost causes,” to rehabilitate the reputation of Henry Wirz, the commander of the notorious prison camp where thirteen thousand Union soldiers died, seven of them, according to contemporaneous records, “of ‘nostalgia’ ” (319, 321). Quickly passing through the national park at Andersonville, which he judges to dilute and “sugar-coat” the brutal realities of the camp, Horwitz locates a group of Wirz partisans with a terminal nostalgia for lost causes. At a ceremony honoring the Confederate commander, a speaker concedes that “some might say ours was, and is, a lost cause,” only to continue, “But it is only lost if we forget. . . . If our true history were known, we’d have four thousand people here today instead of forty!” (328– 29). Talking with another man afterwards, Horwitz proposes a balanced presentation of Civil War prison camps as “something neither side should be proud of,” only to be told, “That dog just won’t hunt . . . Yankees started this all and we’ve got to resist with all available force, even if it seems one-sided” (329–30). Figuring the prison camp as a kind of historical trickster—a northerner and a southerner on different sides of the track see a train running in different directions, but “from where they’re standing they’re both correct” (33)—the man concludes that

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the group’s “extreme position” results from the South’s being “tired of being put down and kicked around” (330). Again, nourishing trauma masquerades as telling the real story; again, Horwitz laments the seeming oxymoron of, as the speaker puts it, “our true history.” History, it seems, can be ours, or it can be true, but it cannot be both. Still, Horwitz wants it to be both as he continually strives to uncover forms of remembrance that might use the Civil War to engage the contemporary reality of “separatism and disunion along class, race, ethnic and gender lines” by affirming a “common people united by common principles” (386). If Andersonville embodies history as “middle East rug barter”—tribal “haggling” that precludes the discovery of “our common history” (330)—history fares no better in the regime of late capitalism. During the Civil Wargasm—an intensive tour of Civil War sites best described as a hair-of-the-dog antidote to time-space compression—Horwitz distills a “dispiriting leitmotif” of the “devastation of Virginia’s historic landscape. The Wilderness a golfers’ rough; Stonewall’s flank march a Fas Mart; Jackson and Lee and Longstreet now names of shopping malls and streets built over the ground over which they’d once fought” (234). Whether mobilized toward the mass brand or the niche identity, the war fails to be incarnated within collective—meaning, for Horwitz, American—forms of memory. What must be suppressed in this account is that “remembrance of the War” as a “talisman against modernity,” a degraded use Horwitz attributes to “many Southerners” (386), defines with some precision his own use of it as a potential corrective to modernity’s collapse into the separatism and empty consumption of the market (the gated community, the golf course) and the equally undesirable divisions of neo-tribal grievance. To pose the matter this way, however, is to dissolve an opposition crucial to Horwitz’s project: namely, his depiction of American interest in the Civil War, exemplified by the Ken Burns documentary “that riveted the nation for weeks” (5), as a deviation from the nation’s normative indifference to history and preference for pop culture (6). Attempting to duplicate Burns’s epic of liberal nationalism, Horwitz takes brief solace in the protection of battlefields from Disney’s substitution of McHistory for the real thing, a contest he glosses as “a rare triumph of high culture over low” (217). Alternatively, the contest can be read as an effort to conceal the musealization of everything else, a way of naturalizing other forms of remembrance by scapegoating an especially salient form of simulation.37 (One wonders whether a realized Disney theme park might have worked better in this way according to Baudrillard’s argument that Disneyland is “presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest [of America] is real.”)38 Noting that his own “childhood fixation” on the Civil War had coincided with the mass merchandising of the war’s centennial, Horwitz wonders briefly

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whether he had been “a creature of twentieth-century commercial culture who had simply latched onto a product line current at the time” (185). He immediately discards the scenario, however, in favor of a genealogical narrative in which he repeats his immigrant great-grandfather’s connection to the war as a “ritual of being American” (389). His “attachment to the Civil War,” Horwitz writes, “was just something I ‘had,’ like myopia or male-pattern baldness, a congenital trait passed down” from his father and great-grandfather. “There was a ritualistic quality,” he concludes, “to my relationship with the Civil War landscape. . . . These were places I’d felt deeply connected to since my childhood, first through the study of sacred texts with my father, and then through my own attempts to reproduce them, like a medieval illuminate, on the walls of my attic bedroom and in the pages of my crude Civil War history” (389). Here, filiation, genetic metaphors, and authentic aura (like medieval illuminate!) signal forms of reproduction irreducible to market praxis. Here, too, lies the ultimate use of the South to Horwitz’s project, since, despite its market- and tribe-driven fragmentations, it retains coherence as the site of the Civil War finished and unfinished—as the location of a culture that has continually cherished the Lost Cause. Between trauma and nothing, Horwitz takes trauma. Wrapping up his narrative, Horwitz concludes that “it would take several lifetimes to fully explore the South’s obsession with the War” (384), a formulation that realigns the region and its narrator-cartographer as fellow Civil War addicts. Ultimately, and against considerable evidence to the contrary, Horwitz uncovers beneath the surfaces of gated communities and strip malls a place and a culture where “everywhere, people spoke of family and fortunes lost in the War; of their nostalgia for a time when the South seemed a cohesive region upholding Christian values and agrarian ways; and, most frequently, of their reverence for larger-than-life men like Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Nathan Bedford Forrest” (384– 85). Lost fortunes, lost cohesion, lost heroes—the losses generated by modernity and the Civil War are collapsed to generate a map of a place that isn’t what it used to be. Horwitz’s South, which may not be Your South and certainly isn’t Turner South’s South, depends on those absences and the rituals of recovery they generate, rituals that just as easily could be mapped on a contemporary terrain of media flows and time-space compression, a ghost terrain wherein groups extract from the Lost Cause a narrative of legible causality in a globalized world of inscrutable causality. Probably Horwitz suppresses this South because it fails to resonate with own identitarian landscape: he wants the South that the South wants, not the South that it actually is. Characterizing his own addiction to the Civil War as “just something I had,” Horwitz borrows the formulation of a rural Virginia storekeeper who re-

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fuses to visit Appomattox because “that way . . . it can always be early April in 1865 and we haven’t yet lost the war” (263). “A Southerner,” according to Jimmy Olgers, “a true Southerner, of which there aren’t many left—is more related to the land, to the home place. Northerners just don’t have that attachment. . . . You can’t miss something you never had and if you never had it, you don’t know what it’s all about” (261). The suppressed corollary is that you don’t know what it’s all about either until you miss it, and it is this differential that ultimately constitutes Horwitz’s South. To Olger’s remarks, Horwitz adds, “I’d heard Southerners say this sort of thing a hundred times before, usually without irony while driving a Jeep Cherokee through traffic-choked suburban streets or watching TV in a ranch-style home that could be Anywhere, America” (262). In the end, however, saying that sort of thing hundreds of times—and without irony—recuperates Anywhere, America as the South—at least as one of them. l At the conclusion of Confederates in the Attic, Horwitz leaves the South of the unfinished Civil War to return home. There, his wife refuses to name their newborn son after a Civil War general, and the couple opts instead for Natty—after “another romantic figure from an earlier time” (390), the hero of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. For V. S. Naipaul in A Turn in the South (1989), the relationship between a romanticized frontier and the U.S. South involves no choice. Naipaul’s South is, fundamentally, a frontier culture—indeed, a doubly frontiered culture, divided as it is between, on the one hand, the traumatic frontier of New World plantation and, on the other, a more utopian frontier in which the figure of the redneck emerges to resolve the deadlocked spaces of southern trauma. “My thoughts were running on the frontier, the life at the extremity of a culture,” Naipaul writes in a chapter entitled “The Frontier, The Heartland,” and the claim might well stand for the entirety of his narrative project. Here, however, we confront two paradoxes that are equally dispersed throughout the text. First, the absence of a frontier proper in the contemporary South necessitates the frontier’s reconfiguration as a privileged site of cognitive mapping—an imagined terrain where thoughts might run on any number of social and historical subjects. Second, the frontier is mapped simultaneously with the heartland, thus inscribing a margin/center relation requiring constant narrative adjudication as Naipaul attempts to reconcile the two Souths he encounters or uncovers: the South at history’s traumatic extremity and the settled South that, through various forms of order, has achieved a “truce” with extremity.

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In tracing the transition from frontier to settlement, Naipaul follows a wellestablished mode of southern cartography, practiced most famously by W. J. Cash in The Mind of the South (1941), wherein the frontier is said to generate the localism and individualism that would form the core of the southern cultural repertoire. “What the frontier had begun,” Cash writes, “the world which succeeded it—the world which was the creation of the plantation—was admirably calculated to preserve and even greatly to extend.” Cash tells the frontier as a story of chaos giving way to order, thereby allowing him to graft the frontier as a kind of quasi-spatial grid onto moments of historical trauma, most notably Reconstruction and the “the Frontier the Yankees made” by making the South “a frontier once more, in that its people were once more without mastery of their environment and must begin again to build up social and economic order out of social and economic chaos.” As with Cash, for whom the postbellum frontier generates a postbellum plantation (since “that is exactly what the Southern factory almost invariably was”), Naipaul refuses to leave the frontier behind, recycling it as needed as a kind of skeleton key to the South he unlocks.39 As fellow Caribbean writer and South-watcher Edouard Glissant observes, “Physical frontiers disappear more easily than mental ones, and for a frontier region such as the American south, it is hard to transcend the frontier. Today, there is a proliferation of frontier worlds, some traditional and others suddenly emergent, suggested to some and imposed on others.”40 Naipaul is scrupulously inattentive, however, where Glissant’s attention is close: namely, to modernity’s alteration of frontier worlds as the “old idea of identity as root” gives way under the pressures of time-space compression, the “speeding up of relationships” enabled by “immediacy of contacts” and the “brutality of the flash agents of Communication.”41 For Naipaul, as we have seen earlier, the South of good roads merely requires closer inspection in order to ensure the legibility of the old frontiers and their identitarian effects. As he observes in Tallahassee, Florida, “just behind the highway” (“American highways make one state look like another”) old dirt roads and ruins make traveling on a southern theme “a little like being in an abandoned European town in Africa, in Zaire or Rwanda” (131). In this sense, Naipaul’s frontier is closer to Cash’s in ensuring the continuity of a root(ed) identity. Whereas, for Cash, the southern “mind” (temperament, “mental pattern”) causes frontier chaos to flow predictably into recognizable social formations, “religion” becomes Naipaul’s preferred code for the production of southern forms of order. Here too, however, a crucial distinction emerges wherein “the religion of the past,” which preserves history’s traumatic contours, is juxtaposed against “religion” that formally engages the pressures of modernity. What remains constant is Naipaul’s archaeological form of mapping, which sup-

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presses, at every instance, an understanding of modernity as a rupture or break. As with Cash, modernity produces less a New South than it reinscribes the contours of the old one. Trauma, conversely, is figured as a very old thing—a repetitive moment in a continually stressed history: “Agricultural and industrial depression now; civil rights movement twenty to thirty years before; the Great Depression before that; and Reconstruction; and the Civil War—it seemed, considering the layers of history whose memorials or remains one could see in a place like Canton, that the South had moved from crisis to crisis. And at the back of it all was the institution that had seeded most of the crises, or aggravated them: slavery, which had led to this present superfluity of black people, people no longer needed in a machine age” (35). “I had a sense of the history here,” Naipaul writes, “resting layer upon layer. The Indians, disappearing after centuries; the poor whites; the blacks; the war and all that had come after; and now the need everyone felt, black and white, poor and not so poor, everyone in his own way, to save his soul” (35). Significantly, the occasion for what will become Naipaul’s refrain of layered history is a party “ ‘Southern’ in its motifs”: a Confederate flag, a roasting pig, bluegrass music—collectively, “things from the past” (34). The “motifs” do not compromise the southernness but rather extend the practice of identity for (white) “people who, in the booming new South, had gone into business and had then felt themselves drifting so far from the Southern world they had known that they had given up, to return to God and the life they felt more at ease in” (34). Space themed “Southern” merely assumes the contours of the layers below; the reproduction of things past preserves the seams and faults of the freighted history beneath. Leaving his South for Charlottesville, Virginia, at the narrative’s conclusion, Naipaul finds “history . . . in quantity,” but only “history as celebration, the history of the resort” and of the subdivision, not the “special past, the past as wound” experienced by the folks in the real South “coming to terms with a more desperate kind of New World history” (307). South of Charlottesville, however (and this is the paradox I wish to explore at some length) even McWorld—at least the world of Shoney’s, where “you’ll get the gravy all over it” (207)—assumes a (white) southern contour. As the passages above suggest, however, Naipaul’s black South is a different matter altogether. Repeatedly dividing his terrain into “all this side white people, all that side black people” (17), Naipaul is less willing to concede the continuity of black identity except under a regime of religious order. Lacking “the supports of faith and community,” the black community appears as the superfluous “debris” of the New World plantation suffering, in its internal “irrationality and selfdestructiveness,” the “final cruelty of slavery” (135). For southern blacks, continuity means the extension of dispossession. “In the Caribbean islands,” Naipaul

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continues, “in the most settled days of slavery, the slaves played at night at having kingdoms of their own: a transference to the plantations of West African beliefs— still current in the Ivory Coast—that the real world begins when the sun goes down, and that at night men change or reverse their daytime roles. No fantasy even like this, no African millenarian dream, supports the new denuded black element. It is hard to enter into their vacancy” (135). For Naipaul, the dissipation of fantasy— the “dream” that inverts “real worlds”—produces “vacancy” (figured as unoccupied or uninhabited space) and social annihilation. Where religious practices obtain, however, occupied space becomes possible. In his prologue, for example, Naipaul is led south by an African American acquaintance named Howard to a “landscape of small ruins” that, for Howard, is also home. Howard “had something,” Naipaul observes, that he lacks: “a patch of earth he thought of as home, absolutely his” (3). Visiting the local church, Naipaul perceives the “pleasures of the religious meeting”—its “formality,” the “idea of community” it engenders. Despite Howard’s ambivalence toward “historical continuity, the past living on” (3), he has access to the past and to home. More often, however, Naipaul’s black subject lacks the codes producing a stable “reality,” and thus wanders “horribly lost” in an unmapped, illegible, and inscrutable world (135). Naipaul’s racial logics lead to startling cartographies. In Charleston, for example, he observes that “against the Toytown aspect of the rest of old Charleston”— that is, the tourist section where “it doesn’t seem possible that anything real can survive” (77)—“the blacks seem like squatters, intruders at the Charleston ball” (78). Tourism organizes space such that “the blacks” are rendered squatters and intruders, inhabitants of a disorderly terrain thrown into sharp relief by the very “tourist trade that keeps historical Charleston in working order, keeps the old families where they are” (78). This despite Naipaul’s concession that the black families are “as old as the old families” (78), a formulation that silently erases the (white) racial marker of “old” families even as it silently erases the past of the black ones. Ironically, the supersession of touristic simulacra deterritorializes the black community (unrecognizable as such), depriving it even of a past. The irony is intensified by the “religion of the past” practiced by white Charlestonians such as Jack Leland, who offers Naipaul a tour “through what he called his ‘territory’ ” (108). “Proud of the land and his old connection with it,” Leland is “emblematic” of “the old Charlestonians,” even though his “own family plantation had been alienated more than fifty years before” (79). The “memorializing of the past” is still among his “concerns” (79): “The land is not mine,” he tells Naipaul, “But I feel it is my heritage” (92). Memory, not property, reproduces Glissant’s atavistic identity, which always recurs to territory as entitled possession.42 Part of Leland’s tour takes

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Naipaul to the “Middleburg Plantation Designer House 1987,” where the restoration of one room by Lowcountry Decorators and Lowcountry Antiques involves, according to the advertisements, “dramatic upbeat fabrics on traditional upholstered pieces” and “new silk trees and plants, the modern homemaker’s answer to her ‘too little time’ problem” (83). Despite the dissonance introduced by the (modern) dialect of advertising and design, Naipaul recuperates the practice as one in which “the land and the past were being honored” (83)—that is, as but another layer accumulating atop a legible history that “could be seen layer by layer: the tourist town, segregation, the Civil War, the plantations, the large slave population, the wealth, the eighteenth-century colony” (89). At the bottom of his archaeological dig, Naipaul excavates Charleston as an eighteenth-century New World colony and connects it to his Caribbean home. Although sometimes figured as an inaugural moment in the postcolonial turn of recent southern studies, this linkage merely reproduces, as Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn argue, a very old South43 —one not only shaped but determined by the old New World frontier of colonialist expansion and plantation economies, but radically impervious to the new New World frontier of economic globalization, mass migration, and the culture of simulacra. Noting Charleston’s proximity to the West Indian colonies, Naipaul writes that “the importance of a colony depends principally on its economic possibilities” (89), but the economic realities of late capitalism go unmarked except as continuous with old forms. For Naipaul, cultural reproduction proceeds smoothly from the repetitive traumas of southern history, thereby allowing the recovery—and re-covering— of a South whose wounded past can be “honored” with fake plants, a South whose other frontier (this one a happier site of premodern subsistence) survives, as we shall see, in the practices of fast-food consumption and Elvis worship. That a wounded past can be honored in the first place exposes the racial seam in southern forms of memory. At the redecorated Middleburg plantation near Charleston, Naipaul observes the lacunae—“what was missing was the slave cabins” (89)—as characteristic of white forms of remembrance, which must purify heritage by excising the racial detritus of plantation culture. As he remarks later in Columbia, “The past as a dream of purity, the past as cause for grief, the past as religion: it is the very prompting of the Shias of Islam to nobility and sacrifice, the dream of the good time of the Prophet and the first four caliphs, before greed and ambition destroyed the newly saved world. It was the very prompting of the Confederate memorial in Columbia. And that very special Southern past, and cause, could be made pure only if it was removed from the squalor of the race issue” (106). Although Naipaul tacitly acknowledges the ease and ubiquity of such filtration, the more intriguing narrative work of the passage lies in its symptomatic

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and contradictory conflation of pasts and causes. As with Horwitz, Naipaul’s logic works in two directions: on the one hand, the plantation is causative of everything that comes after (hence his recurrent geological metaphor); on the other, the past can be practiced as a cause only if it is remembered in selective and strategic ways. The constitutive slippage between practiced memory and its actual referent thus generates a problem of culture: is culture constituted by the practices themselves, or is it the outcome of the real history beneath them? The causal past thus acquires as its ghostly double the past-as-cause, wherein a fetishized notion of “pure” history conceals its contaminated referent so that (white) southern identity can collectively recuperate trauma as “religion.” In his contact with Marion Sass, Naipaul further probes white identity’s capacity for sublimation. Like his father Herbert, the author of a nostalgic essay on antebellum plantation life, Marion Sass practices the religion of the past. “Obsessed,” according to Naipaul, “as his father had been by the superficial destruction of the South—the highways, the fast-food chains” (106), Sass collapses identity and culture. “Southern culture,” he says, “is not simply a matter of the agrarian culture versus the industrial, or the ideals of honor against the crass values of commerce. Southern identity is important because it is Southern. We are Southern. That’s enough” (105). The destruction wrought by the highways—and here we hear echoes of Kennedy’s Swallow Barn and its rumination on the good old days of bad roads—can be “superficial” because the South immune to it is purely formal: an identity/culture posited as anterior (and thus resistant) to anything, even the crass values of commerce. At the same time, Southern identity/culture acquires content, thereby sanctioning southern resistance “to the conquest by the North and resistance to Americanization, which was really Northernization”—despite the irony that “some of the most important ‘American’ things—Coca-Cola, and country music, and even the idea of the supermarket—were Southern” (105). Within the dizzying circularity of this logic, Sass’s identitarian boundaries are clear: “It’s like the Irish,” he says. “But they—the Irish—don’t have this terrible burden of an alien population in their midst” (105).44 Although Naipaul’s form of racial discrimination is slightly less explicit, he too represents black southerners as an alien population. Not only do Naipaul’s black subjects lack what Houston Baker calls “critical memory,” a mode of “cumulative, collective” remembrance that relates the past to the “always uprooted homelessness of now,” Naipaul figures their homelessness as amnesia extending from the historical dislocations of plantation culture.45 White memory, conversely, is anything but critical, yet it sustains practices whereby space is successfully reterritorialized as home. Like Leland, Sass is no squatter, no intruder at the Charleston

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ball: his wounded past, recovered as heritage, generates compelling fictions of location, not the reality of dislocation and “squalor” (Naipaul’s favored term for the material dimension of black dispossession). Put schematically, Naipaul consistently poses black southerners as the passive victims of late modernity—superfluous New World debris in an economy that no longer needs them—whereas white southerners and the South they conjure are impervious to modernity precisely because of their highly artificial religion of the past. Location and dislocation thus map against racial and temporal coordinates: to extend a point made earlier, modernity disorients black culture from the social reality and protective insularity it had achieved prior to desegregation. “I’m nothing, I’m just existing,” says the spokesperson for the new “denuded black element” (135). The “theme” ascribed to Bob Waymer, an Atlanta interlocutor, is thus absorbed as Naipaul’s own: “the solidarity that had come to black people from being shut out, the necessity that had driven them to found their own institutions—and the breakdown that had occurred with the ending of segregation” (66). Even black communities that preserve the comforts of (pre-integration) home deteriorate under the stresses of modernity. In Tallahassee, for example, Naipaul observes that “building development and agricultural failure were putting an end to . . . a community of black sharecroppers. . . . Now the roads had got there; the community, exposed, was breaking up” (133). Whereas for the white South modernity merely looms as a threat, for the black South the threat is realized as devastation. Emergent forms of black community and remembrance lie beyond the pale of Naipaul’s register, itself staggeringly credulous toward white forms of remembrance. At best, Naipaul deploys an elegiac tone of aestheticized remembrance for black communities that have achieved a “truce with irrationality” rather than succumbing to it, as in Howard’s hometown, where he juxtaposes the small ruins of tobacco barns against the highway that “looked like highways everywhere else in the United States: boards for motels and restaurants and gas stations” (4). Although such roads bring, as we have seen, only “superficial” destruction to the white South, for the black South the destruction is quite real. Thus lurks always under the thin veneer of black culture the abyss of “nonentity,” irrationality, and total alienation—the unreal terrain of Naipaul’s black South. Commenting on James Baldwin’s meditation on “being forced . . . to effect a truce with this reality” of being “born a Negro,” Naipaul contemplates the language of a man he admires as an “elegant handle[r] of the language”: “ ‘Reality’—it was what I remembered and what I accepted; but now, in the South, in the middle of my own journey, I began to wonder whether the truce that every black man looked for hadn’t in fact been with the irrationality of the world around him. And

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the achievement of certain people began to appear grander” (120). Among those who potentially inhabit this scenario is the Atlanta politician Marvin Arrington, who dwells in a special kind of unreality. After an unsatisfactory interview with Arrington that “founder[s] on the subject of black disadvantage,” Naipaul worries that “these figures of Atlanta . . . might in fact have been reduced to a certain number of postures and attitudes, might have become their interviews” (57). Reminded of his childhood contact with “Negroes” in Trinidad and his awareness of “the unreality of their domestic life” (58), Naipaul contemplates the resemblance of Arrington to the “black politicians of the Caribbean,” where “such a person, proclaiming his origins in the people . . . and claiming because of his early distress to understand the distress of his people, might have gone on to complete colonial power, might have overthrown an old system and set up in its place something he had fashioned himself” (58). In Atlanta, however, black political power is circumscribed by the “great encircling wealth and true power of white Atlanta,” thus making Atlanta politics “see[m] like a game, a drawing off of rage from black people” that also “stimulated another, unassuageable kind of rage” (58). Similarly, Naipaul wonders whether another black politician and activist, Hosea Williams, “might now have become licensed, a star, a man on the news, someone existing in a special kind of electronic reality or unreality” (28). The leader of a protest in allwhite Forsyth County that was attacked by Ku Klux Klan groups, Williams had organized a second march a week later. Conceding that the first march had been a “brave and lonely cause,” Naipaul depicts the second as a “good, safe cause” (54), a simulated cause deprived of its causality, since both the civil-rights groups—“their major battles and indeed their war won long ago”—and “the white supremacists”— symmetrically and self-indulgently—seek out “causes . . . for publicity and patronage” (53). Although Naipaul later alters his view of Williams, whose “lucidity and goodness” prompt comparisons with Gandhi, he retains his view of the “ritual conflict, played out before the cameras, and according to certain rules.” “Out of this formalizing,” Naipaul continues, “the issue had died. Overexposure was a very American aspect of this formalizing, I also felt. Everyone had been interviewed and interviewed; everyone . . . had become a personality; everyone had now exhausted attention” (53). Again, economic realities circumscribe black agency, consigning it to electronic unreality and the print rituals of the Atlanta Journal, which, despite claiming to “Cove[r] Dixie Like the Dew,” misses the underlying story of economic dispossession—the tale of people, as mayor Andrew Young puts it, “who find that history is leaving them behind” (54). In depicting the Forsyth march as a ritual conflict—“ritual” and “formal” here meaning a counterfeit version of

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history (they will mean other things later on)—Naipaul is seconded by the writer Anne Siddons, whom he interviews as she is embarking on a publicity tour for her recently published Homeplace. According to Siddons, Williams’s march—and “boy can he stage a civil disobedience now!” (45)—enacts the fate of all revolutions: “They just pass into caricature over the years” (45). “Rote and rhetoric” replace “outrage” (44); the “response can—and did—become banal” (40). The white traumas of a century earlier, meanwhile, escape such diminishment. “We had,” she affirms, “bone-deep memories of real conquest and occupation and total humiliation” (40); indeed, her very aunts “talked about the Civil War as though it were yesterday” (48). Nor are white rituals of remembrance merely ritualistic: in her mother’s community, she tells Naipaul, people “put on the old costumes and show the houses,” which embody “identity” and “a sense of place,” as “part of the economy of the place” (48). When Naipaul suggests that the practice is “a kind of masque,” Siddons counters that “it’s more like religion” (48). In the end, Atlanta too (and in sharp contrast to its status as Horwitz’s “anti-South”) evinces for Naipaul the South’s layered history. But the layers are asymmetrical. The visible surfaces of white culture locate their subjects in place and time, while the visible surfaces of black culture consign their subjects to an unreal terrain of empty performance, simulated agency, and disorienting squalor—all mapped as the alienating effects of the New World plantation. l During a visit to Graceland, Naipaul contemplates the black political leaders of the West Indies: For these early leaders who were their own, West Indian blacks had more than adulation. They wished for their leaders to represent them, and more than in a parliamentary way. They wished their leaders (who had started out as poor as everybody else) to be rich (by whatever means) and powerful and glorious. The glory of the black leader became the glory of his people. ... Something like this black political adulation seemed to me at the back of the Presley cult. It was strange—to me—that music should have carried so much a people’s emotional needs. And when, in Nashville, Tennessee, I went to a performance of the “Grand Ole Opry,” the long-running country-music radio program, I felt quite apart from what I was witnessing. It was like a tribal rite; it might all have been in a foreign language. (227)

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Whereas Marvin Arrington fizzles as a faux Caribbean chief consigned by white economic power to the simulated game of black politics, Naipaul figures Elvis as the real thing, the authentic descendant of the Caribbean cult of personality. In one way, this merely extends the logic we have already observed in which the cultural reproductions of the white South (but not the black) ensure the transmission of social meanings. In another, however, Elvis represents a departure, for here Naipaul shifts his focus from the white South generally to the more exotic breed of the redneck. This “species,” as Naipaul later labels him, constitutes the bulk of the Presley cult both collectively and on a literal, individual level: one cultic practice involves “acting on a similar Presley-like principle of expenditure” by consuming the “fast foods . . . like a real-life version of manna” and obtaining “fat as a personal possession” (226). As the language here and in the passage above suggests, Naipaul introduces the idiom of anthropology (a language of distance) to figure the redneck. Not only does the Grand Ole Opry appears as a “tribal rite,” Naipaul later hurries outside to find evidence of his “new craze” as he “might have hurried to see an unusual bird or a deer” (213). Ecce redneck! “And there,” he continues, “they were, barebacked, but with wonderful baseball hats, in a boat among the reeds, on a weekday afternoon—people who, before Campbell had spoken, I might have seen flatly, but now saw as people with a certain past, living out a certain code, a threatened species” (213). As Leigh Anne Duck persuasively argues, the redneck allows Naipaul to resolve a number of conceptual deadlocks, foremost among them his own conflicted psychological investment in what he maps as the private world of his childhood and the public world where, throughout his previous work, such private (and implicitly racialized) identities are declared excessively tribal and therefore inappropriate in negotiating heterogeneous social spaces.46 The redneck, on the other hand, instantiates for Naipaul an intensely pleasurable tribalism. But before turning to the ethnographic logic enabling Naipaul’s coding of the redneck, I want to pause briefly on the road to Graceland, which Naipaul describes as a swerve— a literal turn in the South, since he had originally intended to visit Oxford (or Faulkner), Mississippi.47 Specifically, I want to unpack the narrative crisis in which the redneck intervenes, rescuing the South from the banal surfaces of late modernity and the tortured terrains of post-plantation culture and replenishing its utopian potential. In a chapter entitled “Sanctities,” Naipaul articulates his anxiety over travel on a theme. “At the back of my mind,” he writes, “was always a worry that I would come to a place and all contacts would break down and I would not get beyond the uniformity of the highway and the chain hotel” (222). Moreover, the “theme has to

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develop with the travel. . . . [T]he different stages of a journal cannot simply be versions of one another” (222). Faced with mechanical reproduction in two senses— the repetition of highway uniformity and the repetition of narrative ground already covered—Naipaul worries about being lost in the South and in his story about it. But having found everywhere that highway uniformity is easily bypassed on the way to a thicker terrain beyond, the more prominent worry here is that the chaining of thick terrains will resist articulation as narrative, as a developing theme. At this point in the narrative, the pressure is especially acute. Having just returned from Natchez, “nowadays the object twice a year of ‘pilgrimages,’ ” Naipaul finds that the same old themes have emerged yet again: “the old sentimentality of the South, the divided mind, the beauty and the sorrow of the past containing the unmentionable, ragged, black thing of slavery” (218–19). His language, however, begins to suggest new ways of movement. Mapping “what had been a frontier state, but always with this contradictory component of slavery,” Naipaul produces a curious opposition between the frontier and slavery that enables, as we shall see, his recovery of a different frontier, just as his syntax (“sentimentality,” the scare quotes around “pilgrimages”) begins to press white cultural reproduction subtly but surely toward the domain of the counterfeit. Specularized and selective remembrance is newly compromised by “the ragged, black thing of slavery” visually evident in the “wretched little town” that practices the white religion of the past. Unlike Charleston, where the slave cabins and their “physical squalor” are banished so that ritual may proceed, the squalor of post–oil boom Natchez intrudes irresistibly upon cultic practices of memory. Driving across the river to Louisiana “hoping to find some solid, real place—rather than something connected with the tourist trade—to have lunch in” (219), Naipaul is thwarted by “fast-food places beside the highway” that drive him back to Natchez. There, however, the “ jungle-sewer smell” reminds him of the Brazilian Amazon; the visual destitution of the black community proves “as disturbing to one’s sense of place as the overgrown tennis courts of Tuskegee had been: those courts one afternoon, with African students at play, had absolutely suggested Africa” (219). Caught between the racialized abjection of post-plantation realities and the unreality of conspicuous tourism and fast food, Naipaul has little room to maneuver. More precisely, he has little room to maneuver pleasurably, and it is precisely this deficit that the redneck surmounts, suggesting to him how he “might move” toward Graceland (222), where the cult of Elvis operates minus the slippage and squalor of the post-plantation South and its historical residues. As Duck observes, “rednecks are untroubled by the relationship between their personal or cultural relationship to the past . . . because instead of memorializing or negotiating the

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past, they inhabit it.” In addition, Duck suggests, the redneck allows Naipaul to shift from a South uncannily reminiscent of his Caribbean home to a South of absolute alterity, a shift “precisely calibrated to respond to the anxieties and desires expressed in his more obviously transferential narrative.”48 Moreover, the pleasures of the redneck allow Naipaul to surmount the “writing anxieties” that have intruded on his travel, permitting him to recapture the “romance” and “glow of hopefulness and freedom” that had characterized the early stages of his southern tour (221). Pleasure, as an antidote to both personal (that is, transferential in Duck’s sense) and authorial anxieties, thus reorients a baffling texualized space wherein fears of being lost in the South, “all contacts” having broken down, duplicate anxieties over being lost in a text going nowhere. But while the redneck allows Naipaul to plug into the South anew, the new contact is of a special sort: Naipaul does not risk short-circuiting it by talking with an actual member of the species, instead preferring his interlocutor’s “concrete, lyrical way” of figuring the type. Style begets an appreciation of style—“Art hallows, creates, makes one see” (212)— as Campbell’s “description of their mode of living,” Naipaul relates, “made me see pride and style and a fashion code where I had seen nothing, made me notice what so far I hadn’t sufficiently noticed: the pickup trucks dashingly driven, the baseball caps marked with the name of some company” (212). Far from shoddy fieldwork, Naipaul’s refusal to contact the redneck constitutes the condition of his ethnographic labor. Naipaul’s ethnography-at-a-distance recalls Baudrillard’s analysis of the Tasaday tribe in the Philippines, left to themselves in a cordoned-off “virgin forest” in order to preserve ethnology through a “simulated sacrifice of its object [of investigation] in order to save its reality principle.” Just as ethnography’s refusal to contaminate the primitive tribe enacts for Baudrillard the “generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal,”49 so Naipaul’s hyper-redneck, driven back into the glass coffin of the imagined frontier, becomes the simulation model for all conceivable rednecks before ethnolog y, before even the literary travel narrative of Fanny Kemble, who describes poor whites, in an extended passage Naipaul reproduces in his own text, as “wallow[ing] in unspeakable degradation” and “squalor” (that word again) precisely because they are implicated in a slave society (qtd. in Naipaul 224–25). Naipaul rescues his redneck by mapping him on an imagined frontier anterior to slavery’s “contradiction,” a frontier of subsistence and self-reliance, of a “complete, created world and a complete, divinely sanctioned code” that uncoils to the present—since the redneck’s “father was just like him” (206)—in the code of the gimme cap (advertising for “some company” magically transformed into an authentic folk practice), conspicuous obesity, and the pickup dashingly driven. The redneck is the simula-

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crum that makes all other simulacra recoverable as forms of cultural reproduction in the atavistic sense, continuous modes of cultural transmission using the modern materials of what Jim Applewhite will later call “style-bearing medi[a]” (275). If, as Duck says, “one simply cannot argue that such commodities, spectacles, and media productions separate people from modernity,”50 it is crucial to recognize that Naipaul’s doing so enacts a logic increasingly central to the narrative project of A Turn in the South. Through the legend of the redneck, Naipaul recuperates a kind of cartographic legend, a key that allows surfaces and simulacra to map at every turn the territorial integrity of the South beneath. Country music proves integral to this effort. As Campbell tells Naipaul, “What you must put in, and make sure you do, is them sons of bitches love country-andWestern music” (208). Naipaul heeds the advice with a vengeance, visiting Nashville and ultimately coming, he relates, “through country music, to an understanding of a whole distinctive culture, something I had never imagined existing in the United States” (233). No amount of cultural industrialization, kitsch, conspicuous tourism, or instruction in the mechanical formulae of country music will threaten the cultural integrity evidenced by and achieved through the form. An introduction to “the ‘folksy side’ of country music” does not compromise the authentic “feel of folk songs” that echo back to “ancient Scottish and Irish reels and jigs” (244, 233). Suppressing country music’s perennially fraught relation to authenticity, Naipaul evades altogether the anxieties Steven Feld identifies as pervading the discourse of ethnomusicology. Surveying globalization’s intensification of “music’s deep connection to social identities,” Feld shows that the discourse oscillates between “anxious narratives” that question the authenticity of local forms appropriated by the global music industry and “celebratory narratives” that “place a positive emphasis on [the] fluid identities” emerging from fusion forms that hybridize “bounded, fixed, or essentialized [musical] identities.”51 For Naipaul, there’s no oscillation: the musical identity of his South is unproblematically essentialized and authentic. It is also, predictably enough, white. Pondering that “music should have carried so much of a people’s emotional needs” (227), Naipaul limits his investigation to “white soul music; the singer as star and victim, in both roles representing the community” (233)—and representing it more successfully, to reiterate a point made earlier, than the black political leaders whose empty representation fails to generate collective effort. Although Naipaul models Elvis, who made his career covering black compositions, on the black leaders of the West Indies, he is careful to note the “havoc” wrought by the originals (227), and his narrative elides altogether black soul music—that is to say, soul music—despite a visit to Memphis, where he hears nothing, but visually maps yet another “black city [of] extensive ir-

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retrievable desolation” (228). Reproducing (again) what Tara McPherson calls the logic of lenticular vision, Naipaul reproduces as well a kind of fragmented sonics: he cannot, or at rate does not, hear how the sounds of the South fit together, nor does he see how country music fits within a modern media economy. Within his radically circumscribed field of sight and hearing, however, integration is total. Just as the redneck’s music helps to generate the “complete, created world,” so that music is jammed with Naipaul’s other preferred code for world building: religion. A piece of Elvis kitsch does the jamming: a poster of Elvis leading his mother to Graceland in the sky, glossed by Naipaul as “the beatification of the central figure, with all his sexuality, Graceland like a version of the New Jerusalem in a medieval Doomsday painting” (225). From actual religious practices to the transubstantiation of fast food into “real-life manna,” Naipaul systematically welds heterogeneous cultural materials into roughly symmetrical “sanctities” said to secure social integration: “music and community, and tears and faith” (233). In this interlocking logic, anthropological language slides easily into a language of aesthetics used to describe a culture increasingly figured as a set of aesthetic practices. But if the Elvis poster and the product of the country music industry appear to enact the modernist drama of shoring fragments against ruins—assuming, in Malcomb Bradbury and James McFarland’s words, that the “world, reality, is discontinuous till art comes along”52 —it is crucial to Naipaul’s narrative that he defer discontinuity to a looming, but as-yet-unrealized modernity. The scandalous temporality Duck observes as it accumulates around cultural objects—that is, the impossibility of “pre-modern” fast food—is thus replicated at the level of space itself: modernity becomes less a process that some spaces have experienced and others have not than the very adjudication of space itself: a matter less of sequences than of properties. Naipaul’s blacks are late modern debris not so much because they come after a history of trauma and dispossession, but because their “truce with irrationality” fails to sustain aestheticized forms of sociality, while rednecks figure as premodern precisely because such forms ensure the coherence of their built world. At the bottom of this incoherent division lies a coherent narrative of modernity as assault—a coherence, I should hasten to add, of a purely formal sort. Thus premised, the pristine quality of the redneck’s world must be figured as tenuous, as threatened by modernity in the form of commodified hunting (which dispossesses the redneck from his hereditary hunting lands), the compartmentalization of religion necessitated by heterogeneous societies, and, most conspicuously, the world of the Nissan plant outside of Nashville. There, Naipaul encounters what one interlocutor calls a “superior corporate culture” that threatens the organic southern one by placing “side by side with robots . . . . people whose roots

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are in the land and the farms” (262). Although Naipaul judges the Nissan plant to be a “real world, a complete world,” he quickly adds that “it was a relief to get outside and to see, in the distance, a relic of the old world: a corrugated-iron barn, against trees” (261). As Duck observes, Naipaul becomes “practically addicted to decaying images of the past.”53 But on the frontier, unlike the post-plantation South, the future, not the past, is the wound. The ruin presupposes Nissan as the mother of beauty, ensuring aesthetic pleasure by condemning it to extinction. In such scenarios, Naipaul assumes a kind of pre-elegiac tone. “The frontier had ceased to exist,” he writes, “and the religions it had bred were beginning slowly to die” (244). For some, the center does not hold, and “what had once been the complete, satisfying faith of a complete, clear, enclosed world no longer answered” (239). But for others, even outside the world of the redneck, the encroachments of modernity and “the beginning of a new order leading no one knew where” (263) are held in check by aesthetic modes of world-production. As Naipaul leaves the frontier world of the redneck (where the past is inhabited) to reenter history and the postfrontier, post-plantation (white) South, he finds a judge and an entrepreneur able to fabricate coherence: “The frontier, nature, faith, work, the contract with other men—in Judge Suggs’s world picture the ideas were as knitted together as they were in the world picture of William, the businessman” (201). This rage for order, articulated increasingly as a response to modernity, survives modernity’s onslaught, if only as art. Hence the ascendance of the poet James Applewhite as Naipaul’s final tour guide as his narrative draws to a close. According to Applewhite, the introduction of roads and electricity to the rural South caused people to “feel lost here.” “The sense,” Applewhite continues, “of needing to form a life that had its own regularities, its own formalities—that was a reason that religion had the contour it had. That’s why the formalities of tobacco-growing were so important” (271). The second-order formalities of Applewhite’s poetry about tobacco-growing ensure the survival of the contour. A similar logic obtains with Barry McCarty, the Church of Christ minister and Jesse Helms idolizer whom Naipaul pairs with Applewhite at the narrative’s conclusion as sharing “certain important things in common” (306). Applewhite’s “feeling for the ‘sanctity of the smallest gesture,’ ” his “imaginative, poetic resolution” parallels McCarty’s “feeling . . . for the beauty of the simple life—which, with him, seemed also linked to the idea of a world threatening to get out of control” (306). Visiting McCarty in Elizabeth City, Naipaul meditates on a new past: “The past transformed, lifted above the actual history, and given almost religious symbolism: political faith and religious faith running into one. I had been told that the conservatives of North Carolina spoke in code. The

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code could sometimes be transparent: ‘Tobacco is a Way of Life’ being the small farmer’s plea for government money. But in this flat land of small fields and small ruins there were also certain emotions that were too deep for words” (296). This is the religion of the past of a different order, cleansed of the blot of slavery such that the beauty of the simple life (pre-Paris Hilton) might endure under a regime of time-space compression and media saturation. As McCarty observes, “the simple and honest people who are laboring down here are not so far behind the times as they appear. They watch the same TV programs as people in Chicago or New York or Atlanta. . . . [T]he conservatism and values that are held are held by choice, and not through ignorance of what the modern world has to offer” (293). Applewhite’s poetic code and the tacit code of the North Carolina conservative thus acquire an unlikely symmetry as modes of aesthetic world-production generated, unlike the atavistic repetitions of the redneck, in reaction to modernity’s pressures. Here, the “easy roads” that bring alienation to the black South (and “superficial destruction” to some white Souths) lubricate what Naipaul installs as an overarching formalism—collapsing art and religion as modes of “making a whole”—by necessitating their articulation. Even with an “easy road to Durham,” Applewhite’s poetry continues to meditate on an insular culture “closed in by miles / Which sandy roads, pine barrens, swamps made” (306); even with “the same TV programs,” the cultural integrity of McCarty’s South survives intact. For Naipaul, the white South’s formal conclusions resist time-space compression by aesthetically decompressing time and space. Taking leave of his South to cross into Virginia, Naipaul finds that the past survives only as counterfeit. In the contemporary Virginia fox hunt, “the hounds were trained to hunt foxes and foxes alone in special rented fox-compounds with deep buried fences” (307). By contrast, in the real South that he has departed even North Carolina’s Research Triangle preserves archaic cultural forms. In a terrain of “rural poverty remade to suit its new function, the South seemingly abolished here” (267), a waitress at a trendy quiche restaurant interrupts her mechanical menu recitation to express “medieval” ideas of chaos and order, despite the “theme of this culture,” which Naipaul terms “abundance and choice, the paramountcy of the individual (if only as a consumer), with beauty and luxury and sensual satisfactions as imminent possibilities for all” (283). Again, the veneer of modernity falls away to reveal the South’s erasure as an illusion, one Naipaul here, as always, sees through to the deeper terrain beneath. And yet again, Naipaul’s racialist logic is thrown into sharp relief: if the archaeological contours of Chapel Hill are legible in a way that they are not in Charlottesville, they are legible in a happier way than in the narrative’s third college town, Tuskegee. Juxtaposed against the South’s

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abolition in Huntsville, where the “past had been swallowed up,” Tuskegee seems to Naipaul to “exist in a melancholy time warp,” a ghost of its former self succumbing slowly to decay (154). Faced with Naipaul’s racialized cartographies, it seems clear that race prejudice leads him to ignore or repress black forms of cultural reproduction. What Stanley Elkins did for the plantation, Naipaul does for the postplantation. At the same time, Naipaul brings to bear a criterion of agency that seems to emerge irrepressibly in discriminations between real and unreal spaces. Naipaul’s black subject inhabits a terrain segregated from the white South because it lacks the agency to recode terrain as territory, as home, and thus is exiled to the limbo of electronic unrealities and other simulations. Where, precisely, is Naipaul wrong? In many places, as we shall soon see. In turning now to alternative models of southern cultural reproduction, I want to examine emergent forms of imagining space and agency in an effort to understand how “my South”—that is to say, how the real South—operates under a less restrictive racial logic.

chap ter 3 real / bl ack / south Roots, Seams, and Cultural Reproduction

In a January 2005 column, Leonard Pitts described receiving an e-mail message addressed to “Uncle Tom.” Having used the word “brobdingnagian” in an earlier column, Pitts was enjoined to “stop trying to act like the white man and mastering his culture.” “For us homeys,” the anonymous writer continued, “keep it real. If you want to describe something as big, say ‘Shaq-size.’ ” Keeping it real, in this scenario, means conforming to a cultural ideal in order to maintain the diacritics of difference. This means using the expressive forms necessary, in Pitts’s words, “if you want . . . to be considered truly black.”1 Negotiating a series of ironies—he initially thinks the message is a joke, before concluding that you hear things like this every day—Pitts frames a troubling, if not truly fearful, symmetry: black identity is policed internally as well as from the outside, and the inside demand for cultural authenticity reproduces in disturbing ways forms of racial coercion long familiar to African Americans. Inside policing is no new thing, either; as Robert Reid-Pharr argues in Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American, there is a “deep tendency within black intellectual life to insist upon black singularity, to conjure that which is pure, unique, that which is decidedly black.”2 The irony Pitts leaves hanging is that cultural identities, like all constructions, depend on some level of maintenance lest they succumb to sheer entropy. I begin with Pitts because the idea of authenticity sustaining his interpellation as race traitor stands opposite, but structurally related to, the regime of southern authenticity around which this project is organized. Pitts is asked to keep to an unmistakably urban real, the hip-hop real of street credibility—a radically improvisational real that will discard Shaq tomorrow as it searches for newer, fresher expressive forms. (That “keeping it real” has itself outlasted its shelf life is suggested by Dave Chappelle’s comedy skit “Keeping It Real Gone Bad,” which involves a protagonist whose incessant repetition of the phrase irritates everyone.) South of the urban real of the “homey” is an alternative (and no less ubiquitous) regime of black authenticity that looks away from the street—not to Dixie land per se but to a southern home of a rural, authentic, and organic folk culture. As J. Martin Favor argues in Authentic Blackness, the perennial crisis of black authenticity has often been punctuated, in moments of cultural transition, by a “privileged discourse of black-

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ness” that “places the ‘folk’—southern, rural, and poor—at its forefront.”3 In Call to Home: African-Americans Reclaim the Rural South, Carol Stack deploys precisely such a discourse in analyzing what is surely one of most frequently noted demographic shifts in recent memory: the return migration of African Americans to the South. “We had been led to believe,” Stack writes, “that the great migrations that formed the modern states were one-way, permanent movements. People’s footsteps, it seemed, were facing one way, as if they had stopped cold in their tracks somewhere out there in the urban diaspora. We had also assumed that people in the modern world, once torn from their roots, never look back.”4 Stack’s concept of an urban (and northern) diaspora is unintelligible without a rural (and southern) homeland, a territoriality waiting to be reclaimed by exiles who, if not deracinated, are at least uprooted. But just as Pitts sees the pitfalls in one kind of keeping it real, conformity to a southern folk reality has likewise seen its critics, not least Favor himself, whose study of writers of the New Negro Renaissance privileges a more flexible model of racial identity. As Leigh Anne Duck observes, the South’s position as the repository of black “cultural heritage and authenticity” has occasioned persistent anxiety over what many have viewed as a “dangerous nostalgia inaccessible to modern subjects and inextricably linked to racist exploitation.”5 In “The Politics of Fiction: Anthropology and the Folk,” Hazel Carby argues, vis-à-vis Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, that the “search for black cultural authenticity”—and in particular, an authenticity “situated so exclusively in the rural folk”—occludes the stark urban realities of contemporary black life, acting as a “mode of assurance” in the midst of an urban crisis that is far from reassuring.6 Updating Richard Wright’s scathing review of Hurston’s novel for contemporary times, Carby is herself updated by another Wright partisan, Houston A. Baker, whose Turning South Again argues for anything but a valorization of southern authenticity. Baker organizes his call for a new southern studies around the idea of the South as a carceral space in which white authority, with the assistance of race traitors such as Booker T. Washington, imprisons black bodies. For Baker, the South doesn’t ground black identity so much as entomb it, thereby impeding what he calls “UNITED STATES BLACK MODERNISM: a black public-sphere mobility and fullness of United States black citizenship rights of locomotion, promotion, suffrage, occupational choice and compensation that yield what can only be designated a black-majority, politically participatory, bodily secure GOOD LIFE.” Baker’s South thus emerges less as a homeland than as an anthropomorphized terrain whose white mind generates the “tight spaces” that, in turn, shape the black minds and bodies that must navigate them. For this reason, Baker argues, “there is nothing mythic, spuriously ‘authen-

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ticating,’ thoughtlessly or black-nationalistically essentialist in the assertion that for the Black American majority of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the mind of the (white) South was critical to black personality, cultural, economic, and political formation.” Turning South again means identifying the carceral regime against which black mobility contended and contends. “Black modernism,” he writes, “is not only framed by the American South, but also is inextricable—as cognitive and somatic process of performing blackness out of or within tight spaces— from specific institutionalizations of human life below the Mason-Dixon.”7 Foremost among these institutions is the plantation as it evolves from chattel slavery through its postbellum incarnation in Parchman Prison and Tuskegee Institute to the contemporary prison-industrial complex. For Baker, then, the South operates as a dystopian terrain driving the utopian project of black modernism and its logic of upward (and implicitly northward) mobility. Whether the privileged mode of blackness is understood as linking with (Stack) or decoupling from (Baker) the South, the discourse of racial identity often proceeds with a regional dialect, and it is at this seam that I direct my attention in this chapter. By real/black/south, I mean to identify not a set of divisions but a constellation of intersections, thresholds, sutures, and habituated contact zones through which individual and group identities are mapped against racial and spatial coordinates. Real/black/south identifies interlocking regimes of authenticity: just as authentic blackness is often plotted (both cartographically and narratively) in relation to the South, so the discursive production of the real South often depends on racial criteria. From U. B. Phillips’s notorious assertion that white supremacy constituted the cardinal test of a (real) southerner to more recent assertions that the real South is essentially biracial, the equation of race and place pervades the discourse of southernness. I want to be careful, however, to avoid the implication that real/black/south can be solved as an equation, since I want to argue for the inherent multiplicity of uses to which this constellation has been and continues to be put in projects of cultural reproduction and exchange. My concern, then, is not only the place of the South in black culture but the place—and more specifically, the placement—of black culture in the South. At first glance, this may look like an archaic concern, since almost no one in the post–civil rights era has seriously questioned the integration of black and southern cultures. A notable exception is Michael Kreyling, whose Inventing Southern Literature pointedly questions whether the inclusion of black southern writing within southern literary culture is not, in fact, an appropriation. “What case,” Kreyling asks, “could be made for linking the cultural identities and political interests of black and white southerners within a common heritage, or narrative of identity?” The question is

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rhetorical. Later in his discussion, however, Kreyling subtly alters his query when he asks, “Is black literature in the South really about the South in such ways that we can view the interest of both as coincident?”8 Responding sharply to Kreyling’s literary separatism, Anne Goodwyn Jones poses the salient question: why suddenly— and anomalously, given Kreyling’s previous demolition of the “South” constructed for use in traditional southern literary studies—does he use that South “as a standard by which to judge blacks’ Southernness”?9 Although Kreyling’s earlier question evades this problem (since there are both “black and white southerners”), the later one positively generates it: the South (minus the quotation marks) has interests different from the ones of black literature (merely) in the South, one of whose “culturally and aesthetically mature act[s],” if Raymond Andrews’s Appalachee Red (1978) is any indication, is the “rejection of the southern (white) narrative of identity.” The parenthetical whiteness here confirms the implicit whiteness of the earlier South, thus explaining Kreyling’s anxiety over what he views, at least potentially, as a “takeover of identity.”10 Jones, meanwhile, is having none of it: “Black men and white women,” she writes, “who think of themselves as Southerners do in fact write in and about the South without standing on the foundation of tradition. And although the meaning of and survival of some traditions—such as the Confederate flag—are contested, the visibility of previously invisible Southern traditions inevitably makes the idea of the South more complex.” For these reasons, Jones says, “a revised culture, quite simply, already exists.” Instead, Jones proposes “alternative ways to use the work of non-traditional southerners to ‘reinvent’ Southern literature”: “We could start by recognizing the African-American traditions and white women’s traditions (and for that matter, ‘white trash’ traditions and Snopes traditions and Chickasaw and Cherokee traditions) that have developed in the South as by definition southern culture, as constitutive of Southern culture and literature from the beginning.”11 But Jones’s South is no less slippery than Kreyling’s. In her first formulation, complicating the idea of the South seems to depend on those “who think of themselves as Southerners” doing the complicating and producing the new, complex, but still singular “revised culture.” Thinking of oneself as a southerner is important because it tells us that southern culture (and not some culture based on racial, national, or subregional criteria) is being revised. In Jones’s second formulation, however, identification is no longer at issue, since any group in the South at any time is definitionally constitutive of southern culture. Still singular, this southern culture stands in no need of revision, since, unlike the revised culture to which she initially gestures, it has been both inclusive and southern all along. It doesn’t matter whether African Americans (or for that matter, the Chickasaw) think of themselves as part of southern culture, since by definition (Jones’s,

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not theirs) they are and were “from the beginning.” But when (and of what) was the beginning? With Kreyling, for whom identity figures centrally, the answer is clear enough: when a group identity or imagined community discursively evolved around “the South.” With identity and identification removed from the equation, the burden of culture shifts to space itself, since now we are speaking of a terrain (a space characterized by certain practices or properties, by “how things are done there”) rather than a territoriality (a place to which some identitarian claim is laid). For Kreyling, then, who precedes where, while for Jones, the equation is inverted. Although the logic of territoriality typically underlies arguments affirming a multiracial southern culture, such arguments often display a diffuse sense of what, precisely, constitutes the culture being affirmed. Thadious Davis’s “Reclaiming the South,” for example, simultaneously celebrates the “diversity and existence of differences within the South” and speaks of a single “southern culture” held in common by the diverse and the different. In contrast to Appiah’s description of culture as the “name for the gap between us here and them there,” Davis’s southern culture entails or dispenses with identification as the discursive situation demands. Observing that “black southerners are both literally and imaginatively returning to the region and the past, assuming regional identification for self and group definition,” Davis begs the question of why regional identification needs to be assumed (as an action) by individuals who are already “black southerners” before their literal and imaginative return. Nor is it clear why white southerners share a culture but not a group definition with the black southerners assuming regional identification as (apparently) a subset of racial identification. For Davis, black identity precedes the act of territorial reclamation she celebrates, a scenario enacted by Alex Haley’s self-publicized purchase of an antebellum plantation in Tennessee. Davis is cannily aware of the innovation involved, observing of Haley’s purchase that it is but one manifestation of the “insistent regionality of black selves, a grassroots redefinition” that black southerners undertake with “an intrinsic awareness that cultural products are manufactured and upon a determination to manipulate that reality at long last for their own private and public benefit.” Still, the premised sequences at work here—that selves are black before they are regionally redefined, that “black” selves historically lacked the resources to manipulate cultural production but “at long last” are “determined” to do so—further complicate the idea of the always, already biracial southern culture Davis deploys in critiquing “exclusive” models of a more monolithic culture. If the “redefinition of identity and meaning that hinges upon the intersection of race and region” also hinges, as Davis insists, “upon the inversion of traditional paradigms of power,” by what logic can the pre-redefined,

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pre-inverted South be recuperated as biracial? And lest the “curious practice” Davis describes, in which whites in the South are described without a racial designation and blacks in the South without a regional one,12 appear as an exclusionary curiosity from the benighted days of yore, it is worth noting that Baker practices the curiosity. Turning South Again borrows “the mind of the South” more or less intact from W. J. Cash, whose homogeneously white mind has been subject to critical attack virtually since 1941. As Judith Jackson Fossett notes in a Mississippi Quarterly symposium on Baker’s work, “in Baker’s childhood, to be black in the South was strictly to be a ‘Negro,’ ” a circumstance whose traces are legible throughout Turning South Again. Baker’s “black southern being,” Fossett acutely observes, maintains “at best a tenuous hold on regional identification,” since he must negotiate a “visceral engagement with the simple, totalizing equation that ‘southern = white.’ ”13 That equation, however, hardly squares with the new math that shows blacks in the region identifying themselves as southerners at a rate slightly higher than whites. My point is not to fault either the conceptual looseness of Davis’s and Jones’s models of inclusive southern cultures or the conceptual tightness of Kreyling’s and Baker’s separatist models of cultural identity, but to suggest that all four reproduce a positivist, fundamentalist model of culture that is increasingly distant from the cultural operations of the late South. By fundamentalist, I mean simply the premise that some deep but ultimately legible or recoverable code underwrites the South, lending it coherence and providing it with territorial integrity. Striving after a perfect calculus of interracial southernness, such efforts presume what that project has consistently sought to disavow: an authentic South available to precise representation, a real South waiting for a single best map. Appiah’s “gap between us here and them there” collapses under a regime of deterritorialization simply because us/them maps against spatial coordinates (here/there) in increasingly provisional and contingent ways. That “South” inevitably collates identity and space makes it available to multiple uses, none of them, I suggest, authoritative or total. At its core, this dynamic is nothing new; as Michael O’Brien observes with characteristic shrewdness, “much of the history of the Southern mind” is a debate “not how many angels may dance on the head of a pin, but how many and what manner of men may crowd upon the word South.”14 In contrast to Baker’s uncrowded (white) mind, intensified population flows and the proliferation of cultural (re)productions have further crowded the word, making it increasingly difficult to pin down. In his monumental Southern Regions, Howard Odum shows as one of the demographic markers of southern distinctiveness the low percentage of “Foreign Born Whites” (including only 6,651 “Mexicans” in the entire Southeast),15 a reality difficult to reconcile with today’s South, where the explosion of the

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Spanish-speaking population adds a new dimension to the terrain, if not the territoriality. Similarly, the South represented as “rising again” in white bumpersticker mythology and the South subject to “representin’ ” in Dirty South hip-hop share a nomenclature and occasionally an iconography, but not much else. At the same time, other Souths lend themselves to overtly bi- or multi-racial articulation, most paradigmatically, perhaps, the NuSouth brand in which the Confederate flag is reworked in “traditionally African” colors. A study by geographer David Jansson suggests that the brand is not merely utopian: African Americans in Lynchburg, Virginia, described the meaning of “being Southern” in terms strikingly similar to the members of the League of the South (attitudes toward Confederate iconography aside), stressing family, community, a slower pace of life, rural landscapes, and so forth.16 Given that even work as rigorously empirical as Odum’s fails to map the South with much precision—of the over two hundred maps in Southern Regions, not a single one delineates “the South” precisely17 —it is hardly surprising that less empirical ways of looking should crowd “South” and “southern culture” with all manner of contradictory content. What is perhaps more surprising is that such efforts are so persistent in recycling (for whatever purpose) Cash’s dictum that “if it can be said there are many Souths, the fact remains that there is also one South.” Usually, the one South is called the real South, and while its covert essentialism may lie concealed beneath words such as “complex” and “pluralistic,” the fact remains that some fundamental shared reality underlies such models, keeping “the South” from collapsing into what the journalist Henry Watterson called “simply a geographical expression.”18 Making claims about the South is often, I suggest, a way of staking claims on the South. In this context, I find it suggestive that both Davis and Kreyling situate their real Souths opposite an artificial South associated more or less explicitly with the culture industry. For Davis, the South opposite her real (biracial) one is the “racially and culturally homogeneous” “slick media image of the Sun Belt,” while for Kreyling, the real (racially divided) South is captured in Bucklin Moon’s Without Magnolias (1949), whose female protagonist ruminates over her southern homeland: “That was what home was—the South. Not the gallant South of the magnolia and the julep, or the handsome white man and his beautiful wife, the lost cause that the movies were so fond of portraying, but the real South in back of the stage-set big house—niggertown across the tracks, circled by a harsh and frightened ring of poor whites whose only justification for being alive was that those above them had decreed that they would always, no matter how low they might sink, be better than a Negro. Home, Sweet Home, she thought, and it tasted bitter to her mouth.”19 Slick media image and stage set signal, respec-

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tively, fake Souths opposite the ones Davis and Kreyling mobilize in their divergent scholarly projects. A similar use of counterfeit imagery orients Tara McPherson’s Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South, where popular representations of the South are often decoded as succumbing to what McPherson calls lenticular vision, a separatist “racial economy of visibility” that precludes an “understanding of how the images are joined.”20 For McPherson, lenticular vision finds its origin and purest expression in a piece of cultural kitsch, a souvenir postcard that, viewed one way, shows a plantation house with requisite belle, and viewed another, an image of a grinning mammy figure. Along with a genuine admiration for Reconstructing Dixie, I share Jon Smith’s reservation that, despite her disavowals, McPherson holds an “imagined utopian image of the non-lenticular” that “sometimes operat[es] structurally as a ‘real’ South which the ‘imagined’ Souths fail to represent honestly.”21 Without questioning what McPherson powerfully demonstrates—that lenticularity often preserves pernicious cultural forms—I tend to read the deficit in ethical rather than ontological terms—that is, less as a matter of distorting the South than of deploying a South that ought not to be. In other words, where McPherson tends to oppose lenticular separatism to a real South of cultural “common ground” and affective imbrication, I discriminate between desirable and undesirable ways of using the South. Then, too, I am less sanguine that the lenticular is avoidable in the cultural fields of late capitalism and the ceaseless and instantaneous circulation of images—a proliferation, I suggest, that tends to jam rather than lubricate the mechanics of integrated vision. To reiterate, however, my aim is not to evaluate the bitterness or sweetness of the South as black home, nor to dispel as mere mythology the divergent essentialisms that figure the South as black homeland or carceral regime. (Despite its low status as an academic epithet, “essentialism” continues to describe a wide range of practices through which group boundaries are maintained.) Rather, I want to interrogate essentialist productions of the South as they are mapped on a stressed terrain of interlocking and overlapping territorialities, of rapid oscillations of interpellation and articulation, of similarity and difference. Instead of a real South, I want to think about the South as Appadurai suggests we should conceptualize culture: in a nonsubstantive way—that is, less a set of properties attached to a location (and still less a coherent “way of life” through which a coherent southern identity is maintained) than a flexible and loosely spatialized archive of “materials” (historical, cultural, material) differently mobilized in acts of situated and articulated difference, multiply embedded in what Kreyling calls narratives of identity. Revising Cash, I suggest simply that there are many Souths. Yet in offering “the cul-

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tural” as a “matter of group identity as constituted by some differences among others,” Appadurai, as we have seen, takes care to differentiate his model from older genealogical models of ethnicity by stressing the “conscious and imaginative construction and mobilization of difference.”22 But herein lies a difficulty, since few individuals or groups mobilize difference as a consciously imagined construction, even if, in the final analysis, that is what it is. Hence the fraught but irrepressible nature of the authentic, which assures us that our identities (even multiple and overlapping ones) are rooted in something real, and are not simply there for the taking of a thought. Hence, too, the fetishistic pressures of identity, which demand palpable, material evidence of the ghostly bonds that connect us together (whoever we are) and which we further realize in practices of exchange. My concern with the pragmatics (as opposed to the metaphysics) of authenticity leads me to a looser sense of territoriality than that formulated, for example, by Edouard Glissant, who valorizes a “poetics of relation” against the snares of genealogical identity. In The Poetics of Relation, Glissant writes that “the quest for legitimacy and the assurance of filiation promise that we can conquer the ephemeral and the everlasting at the same time, whether by trying to establish an estate and a family or by trying to make people believe we are destined for a new creation of the world and therefore become “founding fathers” or first men. . . . Certainly when established traditions—races—come into clashing contact, there is a great temptation to get beyond nettlesome cross-breeding by retreating to primordial unity. We seek truth in Being, trying to insure ourselves against the risks in Becoming. That is, we try to return to a source that would legitimize everything. And we strive to pass down this legitimacy without error or interruption.” For Glissant, relation “is linked not to a creation of the world but to the conscious and contradictory experience of contacts among cultures; is produced in the chaotic network of Relation and not in the hidden violence of filiation; does not devise any legitimacy as its guarantee of entitlement, but circulates, newly extended; does not think of a land as a territory from which to project toward other territories but as a place where one gives-on-and-with rather than grasps.”23 Still, a poetics of late southern relation must account for the multiple discourses that continue to reproduce (often by recycling older spatio-discursive formations) “the South” as an undifferentiated and often explicitly rooted territoriality. The South’s capacity to be imagined and reimagined in this way—the logic by which “real South” retains force, in different scenarios, as a test of authenticity—necessitates something like a study of comparative or relational atavisms framed, on the one hand, by a recognition that the production of coherence often defines or even constitutes the work of culture, and on the other, by an awareness that such coherence is inherently unstable and subject

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to innovation. Moreover, where Glissant opposes chaotic relation to primordial unity, I am less persuaded that the opposition holds up in the late South, where genealogy and tradition circulate not only within but between groups, creating new bonds, new contacts, new relations even as it dissolves and renegotiates old ones. In the language of advertising, this is not your father’s atavism. Reading atavism and the uses of “primordial unity” this way—and here I contest Glissant’s characterization of such tactics as retreats; they may be advances or attacks as well—allows us to juxtapose traditions against other traditions and against their own internal logics, and to recognize the narrative structures or stories of tradition that emerge simultaneously, as theorists from Žižek to Anthony Giddens have argued, with modernity itself. Giddens points out that tradition is the “product of the past two hundred years in Europe,” while Žižek acutely observes that “when a certain historical moment is (mis)perceived as the moment of loss of some quality, upon closer inspection it becomes clear that the lost quality emerged only at this very moment of its alleged loss.”24 In contrast to Allen Tate’s dictum that “tradition must . . . be automatically operative before it can be called tradition,” Žižek suggests that we call it so only after it ceases operating automatically. Similarly, Giddens offers historical evidence that Tate’s “paradoxical” injunction to take hold of tradition “by violence” is, in fact, the only way to take hold of it. A pragmatic approach to tradition, then, will avoid verifying the claims traditions make on the South, but without reading tradition itself as intrinsically fake, a (scholarly) tradition most closely associated with Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition, wherein the titular nouns are read as canceling one another.25 In adopting such an approach, I obviously want to avoid a credulity that would adopt or categorically sanction the internal logics of traditions and the cultures they sustain. I share Appiah’s concern that culture and tradition have become inviolate—possessions to which one has a “right” irrespective of “outside” concerns—and there is no question that many traditions generate precisely the violent insularity to which Glissant refers. Instead, I want to draw on Stuart Hall’s poststructuralist approach to cultural identities as he juxtaposes them against essentializing concepts of a “collective or true [cultural] self hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves.’ ” Such essentialist gestures, Hall suggests, are deployed to “stabilize, fix or guarantee an unchanging ‘oneness’ or cultural belongingness underlying all other superficial differences.” (As the language here suggests, questions of priority and authenticity inevitably underlie such productions.) Instead, Hall argues, we should “accept that identities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antago-

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nistic, discourses, practices and positions.” For Hall, identity is best understood as “the meeting point, the point of suture, between on the one hand the discourses and practices which attempt to interpellate, speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be ‘spoken.’ ” Thus conceived, identities constitute “points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us. They are the result of a successful articulation or ‘chaining’ of the subject into the flow of the discourse.”26 By adopting Hall’s idea of the suture as identitarian node and pressing it toward the domain of narrative discourse, we can, on the one hand, recognize the interlocking and multivalent intersections of real/black/south, and, on the other, the reality that individual sutures are as likely to cite or reproduce essentialist modes of identity, both racial and regional, as to transcend them. For all its academic traction, hybridity has proven more slippery in the real world, where individuals and groups continue, intractably, to practice binary and sometimes explicitly atavistic modes of identity, often, perhaps, in reaction to anxieties that in a standardized McWorld we shall all eventually wander an undifferentiated terrain eating the same Big Mac. l How, then, might atavistic identity, which for Glissant always recurs to territory as entitled possession, operate among the deterritorialized spaces and consumerist practices of the late South?27 How, more specifically, might such spaces and practices inflect the suture between “black” and “southern” cultural identities? One place we might begin looking for answers is Mama Dip’s Kitchen in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where diners are invited to “put a taste of the South in your mouth”—to literally consume culture. (That it can be eaten is one of the late South’s peculiar folk beliefs.)28 Offering a cuisine it variously labels as “traditional southern,” “down-home,” or “wholesome, everyday Southern cooking,” Mama Dip’s Kitchen capitalizes on tradition. Visitors to the Mama Dip’s website are informed that “we have a porch, and we love to visit,” but the (usually unoccupied) porch merely simulates sociality: the restaurant staff does not provide actual company. Inside, the restaurant deploys a rustic decor and displays, on a shelf that surrounds the dining space, obsolete kitchen tools from the days of yore when downhome, everyday southern cooking was cooked down home every day in the South. One given to Jamesonian anxieties that Disneyfication makes it difficult to decide whether authenticity still means anything would surely conclude that Mama Dip’s Kitchen isn’t very traditional or very authentic. A colleague, unable to locate the

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new Mama Dip’s Kitchen (which relocated in 1999 and redecorated in ways that I want to consider momentarily), came precisely to this conclusion, lamenting that the restaurant “had become a Cracker Barrel.” As travelers of the U.S. Interstate system know, Cracker Barrel advertises itself as “Where Comfort Meets Food,” offering (as another billboard has it) “Tradition. Served Daily.” Mama Dip’s Kitchen offers a local variation on the theme, serving comfort against what Huyssen characterizes as a cultural acceleration our psyches and senses are ill-prepared to handle. Its artificial backdrops compensate, as Patricia Yaeger suggests of themed space generally, for the deterioration of traditional communal support systems. In a disconcertingly globalized world, Mama Dip’s Kitchen counters the Big Mac with down-home comfort food embedded in musealized, themed space. Upon entering the restaurant, however, one is confronted with two potential barriers to the consumption of authenticity. The first is a checkout counter backed by souvenirs—hats, t-shirts, and, most prominently, the Mama Dip’s Kitchen cookbook. The effect of this space is to immediately position the consumer as a potential tourist. The second obstacle is the actual kitchen, an industrial affair of stainless steel and modern appliances—not a scrap of cast iron to be seen—that is visible as one enters the dining space. In this particular, the new incarnation of Mama Dip’s Kitchen differs markedly from the old one (which was simply called “Dip’s”), where the kitchen was not visible from the dining space. Where, at Dip’s, Mama Dip’s kitchen could operate invisibly as the imagined origin of her handson cuisine, at Mama Dip’s Kitchen, the visible kitchen threatens this imaginary origin and the style of “dump cooking” ostensibly practiced there. Dump cooking, as Mama Dip explains in her cookbook, “means no recipes, just measure by eye and feel and taste and testing.”29 The kitchen—and for that matter the logistics (if we think about it) of preparing hundreds of meals daily (the kitchen, I suggest, makes us think about it)—complicates our ability to imagine our food as authentically embodying this practice. This is not to suggest, however, that the old Dip’s was authentic and the new Mama Dip’s Kitchen isn’t, but that authenticity operates under different regimes at the two restaurants. At the old location, authenticity resided at least partially in the wear, the patina, of the environment. At the new location, where everything is spanking new, authenticity is transferred to the domain of the simulacrum, where mass-produced “rustic” chairs and the display of rusty kitchen tools from days gone by substitute for the real. In making this assessment, however, I want to avoid Baudrillard’s apocalyptic narrative in which the “murder of the real” and the impossibility of exchange mark the end of the world as we knew it. Rather, I suggest, the simulation of tradition at Mama Dip’s Kitchen constitutes the world we

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know precisely by reembedding tradition within the domain of the everyday. The economy of the restaurant depends upon a quotidian and fully naturalized mode of exchange wherein money is traded for food, souvenirs, aura, and so forth—the sum total of what permits the South to be consumed. (The dollars flow one way, and the South flows the other.) If there is, following the logic of the cultural fetish we observed in chapter 1, an asymmetry or incommensurability inherent in such transactions, we are nevertheless accustomed to them as part of routine, habituated practice. At the same time, the presence of souvenirs at Mama Dip’s Kitchen signals a mode of consumption partially irreducible to the domain of the everyday. As Susan Stewart explains, “We do not need or desire souvenirs of events that are repeatable. Rather we need and desire souvenirs of events that are reportable, events whose materiality has escaped us, events that thereby exist only through the invention of narrative.”30 If the South can be tasted, it must also be swallowed and digested; Stewart suggests how souvenirs might preserve the eaten South through the narrative apparatus of memory. To call Mama Dip’s Kitchen a themed space is to state the obvious; what is perhaps less clear is how, to borrow Benjamin’s language, the partial “liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage”— on the one hand, fully submitted to a mechanical market praxis, but on the other, somehow surviving the process—works to recirculate and revalue tradition in distinctly untraditional ways. One thing, however, is transparent in its clarity: the partial liquidation of culture is far from cathartic in the sense suggested by Benjamin, for whom mechanical reproduction consigns heritage to history’s dustbin. Rather, the South’s partial liquidation allows it, in one sense, to flow more freely. Although the work of cultural reproduction at Mama Dip’s Kitchen generates, as always, the problem of authenticity—the ever-tenuous recuperation of aura in the age of advertising—in what follows, I want to suggest that such work is neither categorically pernicious nor intrinsically spurious. Rather, I argue, Mama Dip’s Kitchen enables a flexible accumulation of culture that strives to loosen southern tight spaces as it fabricates less constrictive sutures of racial and regional identities. In Black Hunger, Doris Witt considers the identitarian implications of the most famous brand associated with black womanhood. Of Aunt Jemima, Witt writes that “although the trademark is generally construed as a symptom of a racially bifurcated country, it would be more accurate to say that it has historically marked a space where members of a heterogeneous population could, through the production, performance, and/or purchase of black womanhood, ‘play with their identities’ (albeit in unequally empowered ways) and navigate the changes wrought since the late nineteenth century by immigration, urbanization, and imperialism.”31 Witt’s conception of playing with identities and with cultures resonates, perhaps,

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even more powerfully through Mama Dip’s Kitchen’s offerings to a society navigating the changes wrought by globalization, not least by helping to produce a locality to be navigated. In his influential analysis of nineteenth-century local color, Richard Brodhead argues that a “process of delocalization helped produce a form of writing devoted to featuring local difference, so that the literature of local color emerged as the dominant American literary genre in the same decade as did the transcontinental railroad and Standard Oil.”32 A century later, as a locally themed space, Mama Dip’s Kitchen helps to constitute Chapel Hill qua Chapel Hill in an age of deterritorialization and accelerated time-space compression. If, as David Harvey suggests, “it is hard to tell exactly what space we are in when it comes to assessing causes and effects, meanings or values,” Mama Dip’s Kitchen transforms abstract space into locality, a function verified by no less a local authority than longtime University of North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith, whose blurb is prominently featured on the cookbook’s back cover. “I’ve been a fan of Dip’s for years,” Smith affirms. “Chapel Hill wouldn’t be the Southern Part of Heaven without her.” Just as local color depended upon a national network of literary journals and presses, so Mama Dip’s Kitchen mobilizes contemporary media—Southern Living magazine, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Good Morning, America, and (perhaps most fittingly) Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion—as it incarnates the southern part of heaven. If, as Henri Lefebvre suggests, each mode of production generates its own peculiar spaces, it may be that Mama Dip’s Kitchen constitutes a paradigmatically local space in a global, consumption-based economy.33 But what color is that space? If the top part of the “Southern Part of Heaven” is Carolina blue (thereby indicating, according to local bumper-sticker folklore, God’s allegiance as a Tar Heel), what racial hues and mixtures paint the “down home” part on the ground? If, as we have seen in chapter 1, Tara Club Estates themes a distinctively white form of southern locality, what racial valences operate at Mama Dip’s Kitchen? Although Mama Dip describes her cuisine exclusively in deracialized terms, it is equally available to the racialized genealogy of “soul food” or “African-American Heritage Cooking,” the latter the subject of a book by Jessica B. Harris, whose blurb follows Dean Smith’s on the cookbook’s back cover. Not coincidentally, perhaps, the menu item singled out as “really ‘down home’ ” is the most racially inflected item on it, chitlins.34 The nomenclature attached to the kind of food Mama Dip offers is neither insignificant nor uncontested. In a 1998 Village Voice column examining the explosion of traditional African American cooking, Lisa Jones parodies the sensibility of a talented tenth who patronize the “upscale theme park called Soul Food Village,” where they spend their “leisure time” discovering “the home cooking of their forebears.” With deft touch, Jones

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admonishes, “Don’t call it soul food—demeaning, far-too-folksy, gone the way of race movies. . . . Call it ‘Dunbar’ food (named by Ishmael Reed after the ‘dialect’ poet, Paul Lawrence Dunbar), Southern revival, low-country, and Afro-Atlantic.” Still, and with caveats, Jones positions soul food as part of a useable cultural heritage, a way of “recouping black pleasure in an era increasingly hostile to black people.”35 As the best-selling book in the history of the University of North Carolina Press, the Mama Dip’s Kitchen cookbook is (like the restaurant itself) strategically positioned to capitalize on that heritage, appearing alongside works by Jesse Jackson and Henry Louis Gates in a 1999 Library Journal article listing “55 Books for Black History Month and Beyond.”36 In a more diasporic context, it appears under the rubric “Cooking While Black” on the website africana.com, which advertises itself as the “Gateway to the Black World.”37 (At least it did. In what hardly qualifies as irony in the age of global media, africana.com has been colonized by AOL Black Voices.) What perhaps bears reiterating is the novelty of the position filled by Mama Dip’s Kitchen in its textual and spatial incarnations: if Mama Dip’s Kitchen advertises itself today as a “North Carolina Tradition for 26 years,” it was not a tradition for all twenty-six. This is not to say, however, that it hasn’t been a tradition for some of the twenty-six, but that its traditionality is contingent on a culture of musealization that evolved subsequent to the restaurant itself. Writing on the development of “African-American food traditions” as a “trendy cuisine,” Alice Demetrius Stock captures the paradox precisely, noting that the trend, “encouraged by the comfort food revolution,” has generated a “flood” of cookbooks that “advance the new cuisine.”38 That a trendy tradition hardly registers as paradoxical suggests the nature of the shift. What, then, guarantees or at least makes plausible the consumption of emergent and innovative cultural forms as traditional? One answer is clearly Mama Dip herself. As Dean Smith’s conflation of Dip’s and Mama Dip suggests, the figure of the cook ensures that food is coded as culture. The convention is pervasive in cookbooks on African American heritage cooking, many of which are organized around a cook whose voice guarantees authenticity, reproducing, in the thin pages of a book, the culturally thick space of the kitchens in which tradition was originally transmitted. The trope of the talking cookbook allows the voice of the cultural expert to bear witness to tradition, ensuring that culture survives the regime of mechanical reproduction to which the recipe, as written form, is inevitably committed. According to Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, “soul food recipes, like folktales, are handed down by word of mouth,” a fact that did not prevent her from penning one of the early cookbooks in the genre, Vibration Cooking: Or, the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl.39 In The Soul of Southern Cooking, Kathy Starr provides instructions for

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slaughtering a hog.40 The directions aren’t informational (since no one who has ever bought the cookbook actually needs to know), but rather testimonial, assuring the reader that Starr has participated in the ritual. Since Mama Dip emphasizes “dump cooking,” a technique wherein aura resides in the improvisation of trained hands, the paradox is especially salient, a problem she solves neatly in her introduction. Noting that she has “been writing things down and measuring them so I can know I’m giving out the right information for some good country cooking,” Mama Dip continues: “Still, you should be mindful of my recipes’ origins in the dump cooking style. Feel free to modify and adapt them as you like.”41 The talking cookbook encourages its reader to talk back, reworking authenticity as a readerly imperative to avoid mechanical reproduction. As personal testimony, Mama Dip’s story protects her cuisine from the lurking fetishisms of mass production and the far-too-folksy. In the narrative that opens her cookbook, Mama Dip, whose real name is Mildred Council, begins by describing what she was and is: “I was born a colored baby girl . . . grew up a Negro in my youth; lived my adult life black; and am now a 70-year old American.” Within this progressive sequence, Mama Dip changes from a kind of person associated with circumscribed possibilities and tight places to a kind associated with mobility and enhanced opportunity. Notably, however, “southern” is absent as an identity: if her cuisine is “southern,” Mama Dip herself never is. The effect of this omission, I suggest, is to loosen the sutures between race and region. At the same time, Mama Dip’s narrative orients itself at crucial points to a distinctly southern history of racial oppression. In a telling passage, Mama Dip describes the origin of her culinary improvisation, “doing family cooking” in the kitchen of Mrs. Robinson. “All I ever knew her as was Mrs. Robinson,” she observes. “At that time, blacks used only the last names of their employers.” Mistaking a request from her employer— actually a command, since “Mrs. Robinson told me to cook some sweet potatoes”— Mama Dip improvises a recipe that pleases the family: “And I’ve been making up my own recipes and cooking them ever since.” Subtly but clearly signaling the deprivations of domestic service, Mama Dip changes the recipe and slips the yoke, immediately shifting in her narrative from this episode to the purchase, twenty years later, of her first restaurant from “the first black realtor in town.. 42 Narratively, the shift is inexplicable except insofar as it encodes a story of race, labor, and property that is legible but not overt, and probably more legible to some than to others. Mama Dip emerges as assertive, but politically circumspect. On a continuum between Smart-Grosvenor, whose cuisine is flavored with 1960s black nationalism and 1970s feminism, and Michael Jordan, who explained his political reticence as the effect of Republicans buying shoes, Mama Dip falls somewhere in between.

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This liminal positioning enables the flexible accumulation of culture, the multiple codings of “southern” food-as-heritage available at Mama Dip’s. If, as Yaeger suggests, themed space is inevitably pre-narrated space, multiple narratives are available for consumption: the story of the good old days and the story of good new days, the nostalgic tale of a simpler South of yore and the progressive narrative of African American ascent. If the restaurant serves “our” food as comfort in an uncomfortable world, “our” is capable of multiple inflections. But if, on the one hand, Mama Dip’s Kitchen locates the utopian projects of black cultural visibility, economic mobility, and an authentically integrated southern culture, it is a thin utopianism organized around the pleasures of comfort and thus easily absorbed in—if not already constitutive of—the status quo. How revolutionary, after all, can the comfort food revolution really be? For one so inclined, it isn’t difficult to envision a global-capitalist incarnation of Marie Antoinette declaring “let them eat heritage.” Even less comfortably, Mama Dip potentially appears as yet another guarantor of a detoxified southern tradition, another iteration of the black southern witness to the good old days, a figure that stretches back beyond Thomas Nelson Page. The black woman is, after all, still in the kitchen, even if the kitchen is hers. But that is not a negligible difference, nor is the one between Mama Dip’s cagey self-marketing and the marketing of Aunt Jemima controlled by a whiteowned corporation. If the figure of Mama Dip stands poised as a potential victim of southern love and theft, the person of Mildred Council ensures that theft is only a metaphor: the dollars are flowing into her pocket. Then, too, the cultural work of the restaurant invites, in the most hopeful analysis, a re-valuing of tradition(s). As Witt suggests of Aunt Jemima, but in a social economy wherein the calculus of power has shifted, Mama Dip allows consumers to play with identities through the sutures described by real/black/south. In so doing, the restaurant affords the conditions under which those terms might dissolve and reaggregate in innovative and creative ways. In this sense, and in opposition to Baker’s “tight spaces,” I want to call Mama Dip’s a loose space in order to identify it as not a fraudulent copy of a “real/black/southern tradition” cooked into ambiguity, but as what McPherson calls a “model” (a word I stress in all its multiple meanings) “of commonality across difference, of shared traditions.”43 It’s not that separate “we’s” do not occupy shared space, but that those we’s are pressed closer together as Mama Dip’s Kitchen enacts one of the crucial functions of the restaurant in contemporary American society—namely, the positioning of the private space of the table within the public (and hence quasi-social) space of the dining area. In a curious way, then, it is as a compromised form of culture that Mama Dip’s Kitchen offers a

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kind of late southern contact zone, a model of cultural compromise that allows us, in actual space, to imagine a more comfortable and flexible South, an improvised South—a dump South, if you will, measured by eye and taste and testing. l Whereas Mama Dip’s Kitchen enacts the hybridizing cultural logic of the NuSouth brand, Percival Everett’s “The Appropriation of Cultures” uses the Confederate flag to narrate a cultural encounter of an entirely different sort. In this short story from Everett’s 2004 collection Damned If I Do, a jazz musician named Daniel Barkley, performing at a “joint near the campus of the University of South Carolina,” is taunted to play “Dixie” by some “white boys from a fraternity.”44 Despite having “grown up hating” the song that “the whites had always pulled out to remind themselves and those other people just where they were” (92), Daniel takes up the challenge and sings, “feeling that the lyrics were his, deciding that the song was his. . . . The irony of his playing the song straight and from the heart was made more ironic by the fact that as he played it, it came straight and from his heart, as he was claiming Southern soil, or at least recognizing his blood in it. His was the land of cotton and hell no, it was not forgotten” (92–93). Irony cancels irony as mere performance proceeds to real affect, antagonistic reaction to territorial claim. The deeper irony is that Daniel’s appropriation of culture reverses an earlier white appropriation of “Dixie” from its original black voicing: in an uncanny way, the lyrics were his, racially speaking. In the original minstrel version of “Dixie,”45 only the first verse bears any note of elegy. From there, the song shifts to the farcical tale of “Old Missus’s” unhappy marriage to a “gay deceaber” named William: But when he put his arm around ‘er, He smiled as fierce as a forty pounder .... His face was sharp as a butcher’s cleaber, But dat did not seem to greab ‘er Here, indeed, is irony: a plantation inhabited not by charming belles but by gullible matrons acting “de foolish part,” not by gallant and dashing gentlemen but by mercenary “gay deceabers” who are ugly to boot. Enjoining the audience to “hoe it down and scratch your grabble, / To Dixie’s land I’m bound to trabble,” the minstrel voice recalls Dixie in anything but wistful tones. Only when the conductor

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Herman Arnold played “Dixie”—and only its first verse, to be sure—at Jefferson Davis’s inaugural in Montgomery, Alabama, did it begin to assume its place in a distinctively white lineage of cultural memory. The prehistory of the white “Dixie” helps to contextualize the more explicit site of cultural appropriation in Everett’s story. When Daniel returns home, he falls asleep and has a “dream in which he stopped Pickett’s men on the Emmitsburg Road on their way to the field and said, ‘Give me back my flag’ ” (93). In the culture skirmish that follows, Daniel buys a Confederate flag decal with a truck attached to it, since he “need[s] the truck for the decal” (98). As he explains to his friend Sarah, whose “very large Afro hairdo” signals her politics, “I’ve decided that the rebel flag is my flag. My blood is Southern blood, right? Well, it’s my flag” (98). Daniel’s logic is not synthetic, but territorial and invasive. By disrupting symbolic economies, he repossesses the symbol, redefining it upon taking possession of the decal/truck as the “black-power flag” (100). His redefinition gains market share, and “soon, there were several, then many cars and trucks in Columbia, South Carolina, sporting Confederate flags and being driven by black people. . . . Black people all over the state flew the Confederate flag. The symbol began to disappear from the fronts of big rigs and the back windows of jacked-up four-wheelers” (103). Finally, and “with no ceremony, no notice,” the flag disappears from the state capitol. No collective southern “we” emerges from the contest over what Daniel claims as “our flag” (101); there are no happy conclusions of interracial commonality. Repossession for some means dispossession for others. For Daniel, capture the flag is a zero-sum game. “So, the goddamn flag is flying over the State Capitol,” he says. “Don’t take it down, just take it” (99). And take it he does. “The Appropriation of Cultures” scrupulously avoids any romanticized notion of the South as black homeland. Daniel’s relation to place and culture is, if anything, thin and abstract. Instead of a sense of place, he inherits money that allows him to “spend most of his time reading” and to play jazz standards and “old-time slide tunes”—performing black culture, in a sense—for white students at the University of South Carolina. (Daniel’s degree, by contrast, is pure Ivy League: American Studies at Brown.) Given Everett’s long-standing antipathy toward demands for black authenticity, Daniel’s privileged status acquires a certain logic. In a 2004 interview with Rone Shavers, Everett noted that despite knowing many African Americans with privileged backgrounds and professional accomplishments, “it’s not what people want to think is the black experience—they want their black experience to be inner-city and rural south.”46 Similarly, Everett rejects the market pressures forcing African American fiction toward either “ghetto novels or rural

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Southern novels.”47 Read alongside Everett’s Erasure (2001) and its brilliant parody of ghetto authenticity as embodied (grotesquely) in Juanita Mae Jenkins’s We’s Lives in Da Ghetto and peddled (gushingly) by a thinly disguised version of Oprah Winfrey, “The Appropriation of Cultures” disrupts, in a roughly symmetrical way, the imperatives of rural black authenticity. As a black farmer working the land, Daniel would not work half so well. This is because Everett’s narrative work through him has little to do with “claiming southern soil” per se, but rather with reworking (or replaying) the symbolic constitution of space as (tight) place. Where song and flag serve white authority in its effort to remind “those other people just where they were,” Daniel ensures that they just won’t serve any more by literally messing with them, contaminating them as symbolic vehicles of white supremacy. On his symbolic vehicle, meanwhile, the Confederate flag is literally mobilized in an effort to break up coercive forms of white territoriality. An improviser in more than a musical sense, Daniel slides and bends “Dixie” into the sound of black identity; by changing the Confederate flag into a sign of “black power” he slips the yoke of racial interpellation. The narrative work of the story, then, is not so much to fix a stable or permanent relation between black and southern identities (much less to valorize a real black South) as to fabricate a suture that unravels the fabric of coercive social relations and the tight fits they fashion. In contrast to the interracial appropriation of culture in Everett’s story, Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” suggests that cultural appropriation can be an inside job as well. Perhaps no single story more effectively condenses the paradox of cultural reproduction. Organized as an oppositional set of subnarratives accumulating around material objects—house, butter churn, bench, quilts—“Everyday Use” traces the contested valuation of those objects within disparate regimes of knowledge. For Dee, the story’s antagonist, such objects have acquired new values. Things she has previously rejected as “old-fashioned, out of style,” she now declares “priceless,” their value enhanced by the “rump prints” worn in the benches, the “small sinks” in the dasher “where thumbs and fingers had sunk into the wood,” and the scraps of old fabric that ensure the quilts’ aura.48 Having refused the quilts upon leaving for college, she now cherishes them as containers of “heritage” and thus as decorative objects irreducible to the everyday. Conversely, her sister Maggie, she accuses, is “backward enough to put them to everyday use” (57). Dee, meanwhile, would “hang them on the wall”—“as if,” her mother sardonically observes, “that was the only thing you could do with quilts!” Upon returning home, Dee similarly reappraises the family’s house. Although her mother expects that “when Dee sees it she will want to tear it down,” Dee instead aggressively documents it. Polaroid in hand, she “lines up picture after picture of me sitting there in front

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of the house with Maggie cowering behind,” never taking “a shot without making sure that the house is included” (53). That Dee uses a Polaroid is no accident: she wants instant access to her heritage, not the kind that requires development. But her vision of heritage, as she desires and records it, is radically attenuated. If she values the family rump prints, she cares little for family names, having discarded “Dee” for “Wangero Leewanika Kamanjo.” Explaining that she can’t bear “being named after the people who oppress me” (53), she disavows a family heritage of “Dees” dating back to antebellum times. There is heritage and there is heritage, and Dee’s schizophrenic appropriation of this but not that points up the artificial nature of heritage as she practices it. For Dee, as for the white activist Lynne in Meridian (1976), “the South—and the black people living there—was Art. The songs, the dances, the food, the speech.”49 The narrative point of cultural objects—and as Dee insists, “The point is these quilts, these quilts!” (58)—is to juxtapose one understanding of culture (as an archive, a repository of valued objects and practices from which one can make strategic withdrawals) with another that defines culture as everyday practice, a matter of repetitive and regularized behaviors that ensure continuity over time. The point of the quilts thus acts as a fulcrum (momentarily) balancing two stories of culture, although the weightier, more substantive one becomes evident soon enough. Just as firmly as it exposes Dee’s free-floating fetishism as falsely attaching value to material objects, “Everyday Use” validates the organic regime of cultural reproduction practiced, and indeed inhabited, by Maggie and her mother. Where Dee would hang culture, Maggie extends it: she “can always make some more” quilts (58). Spatially, the story is organized as a home invasion perpetrated by a cultural tourist. Beginning in a yard “more comfortable than most people know” (47) and ending with mother and daughter sitting “there just enjoying” (59), the pleasures of habitation bracket Dee’s thin valuation of culture as art. Dee’s newfound love of “these quilts” is thus exposed as a kind of attempted theft as well. And despite Dee’s parting shot (she takes pleasure in shots both photographic and verbal) that “You just don’t understand . . . [y]our heritage” (59), the narrative insists that it is Dee whose understanding is impoverished: despite her demands for the real quilt and not the machine-stitched one, her heritage is the fake. So insistent is this preference that readers are likely to miss how the narrative surreptitiously carves out a space and a logic for the hung quilt. If the pleasures of repetition and continuity characterize the mother’s relation to culture and her subsequent antipathy toward Dee, this relation also encloses the mother within a static environment. When her house is burned to the ground, for example, she rebuilds a new one “just like the one that burned,” including the original’s lack of

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“real windows” (51).50 Whereas for the mother, memory is a form of repetition, for Dee it is a form of innovation, a way of altering relations. This is why Dee links her mother and sister’s alienation from “heritage” to their passive acceptance of the status quo. “You ought to try to make something of yourself,” she tells Maggie. “It’s really a new day for us. But from the way you and Mama still live you’d never know it” (59). As with Scarlett O’Hara, a fetishized notion of the old ways conditions Dee to meet tomorrow as another day, a new day receptive to dynamic self-fashioning, the project of (literally) “making something” of herself that has defined her from an early age. Even at sixteen, her mother relates, Dee “had a style of her own: and knew what style was” (50). Unlike Scarlett, however, Dee’s style acquires a broader political resonance: the new day is not just for me, but for us. Dee’s “we” is tyrannical (in Lyotard’s sense) at the same time that it’s useful: it rearranges things. For her part, the mother’s acceptance of things borders on resignation. Noting her own lack of education, she says simply, “Don’t ask me why: in 1927 colored asked fewer questions than they do now” (50). It’s not clear that she’s asking even now. Despite Dee’s faux Africanism, it is the faux Africanists of the story who resist white authority. When the “beef-cattle peoples down the road,” partially aligned with Dee and her male companion, guard their herd with rifles from the “white folks,” the mother “walk[s] a mile and a half just to see the sight” (54). She is a spectator, not an actor, in the drama. She is, similarly, a spectator—and a reluctant one—to her daughter’s career. Early in the story, she describes a recurrent dream in which she appears as part of Dee’s supporting cast on one of “those TV shows where the child who has ‘made it’ is confronted, as a surprise, by her own mother and father” (47). On television, she is “the way my daughter would want me to be”—a hundred pounds lighter, with a quick and witty tongue—not the way she is in “real life” (48). It’s not perfectly clear whose wish is being fulfilled: it’s the mother’s dream, after all. Similarly, as a member of Dee’s audience in real life, the mother oscillates between acute resentment and a furtive desire to inhabit her daughter’s more capacious world: “She used to read to us without pity; forcing words, lies, other folks’ habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath her voice. She washed us in a river of make-believe, burned us with a lot of knowledge we didn’t necessarily need to know. Pressed us to her with the serious way she read, to shove us away at just the moment, like dimwits, we seemed about to understand” (50). At the same time that she disavows and devalues what Dee wants her to know—the “lies” and the “make-believe,” the different cultural habits of other “folks,” the useless and flammable knowledge—she expresses rage at Dee’s not letting her know, of pushing her away at the moment of incipient understanding. Dee’s abuse of knowledge originating outside of the cultural habitus is predicated,

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in turn, on the alignment of that knowledge with power, since only as power can knowledge be abused. “Everyday Use” thus organizes the absolute alterity of the everyday and the utopian, of continuity and innovation, refusing to synthesize its disparate regimes of cultural knowledge and memory. In very different ways, both Dee and her mother fail to integrate a narrative of cultural roots with an improvisational and dynamic engagement with the present. In turning now to two narratives (Alex Haley’s Roots and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust) that effect precisely such an integration, I want to interrogate how even (and perhaps especially) the simulation of roots performs the cultural work of the present. l Near the conclusion of Roots (1976), Alex Haley describes listening to a griot in the Gambian village of Juffure, where he has journeyed to recover traces of his family’s ancestry. When the griot mentions Kunta Kinte, “who went away from his village to chop wood . . . [and] was never seen again,” Haley is awestruck: “I sat as if I were carved of stone. My blood seemed to have congealed. The man whose lifetime had been in this back-country African village had no way in the world to know that he had just echoed what I had heard all through my boyhood years on my grandma’s front porch in Henning, Tennessee . . . of an African who always had insisted that his name was “Kin-tay”; who had called a guitar a “ko,” and a river within the state of Virginia, “Kamby Bolongo”; and who had been kidnaped [sic] into slavery while not far from his village, chopping wood, to make himself a drum.” 51 At this moment, Roots has come full circle: the griot’s reference to Kunta Kinte completes the narrative journey Haley himself has traced from Kunta Kinte’s birth in 1750. Even before that, in the book’s “Acknowledgements,” Haley affirms his “immense debt to the griots of Africa,” who “symbolize how all human ancestry goes back to some place, and some time, where there was no writing.” “Then,” Haley writes, “the memories and the mouths of the ancient elders was the only way that early histories of mankind got passed along . . . for all of us today to know who we are” (vii–viii). As in the passage above, the textual ellipsis stakes out a narrative possibility: a gap waiting for a story to fill it in. Because the stake of “passing along” history is identity itself—otherwise we don’t “know who we are”—the need for a story to fill the gap is powerful. And so Haley does, tracing his roots—or at least, as David Chioni Moore observes, 1/256 of them—back to the place where his story began and continues, in the present, to be told as part of a living cultural repertoire. Of course, the continuity so assured is purely a matter of narrative artifice—of “faction,” to use the term Haley coined in the scandalous aftermath of Roots, which in-

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cluded two lawsuits for plagiarism (one brought by Margaret Walker, the other by Harold Courtlander) and the relentless exposé journalism of Philip Nobile in the Village Voice. “Faction,” as Haley improvises it on the fly, works in two ways: on the one hand, countering the historical fictions and fictional reproductions brought to light by his detractors, and on the other, pointing back to its everyday meaning as a subset of a larger (implicitly political) group. As faction, Kunta Kinte is conjured to “document[t],” as Haley puts it, his “maternal family’s treasured oral history . . . back into Africa where all black Americans began” (vii). Materialized as narrative fetish, Kunta Kinte somatically incarnates African lineage, literally embodying an answer to Countee Cullen’s old question, “What is Africa to me?” As, in Glissant’s terms, a primordial “source that would legitimize everything . . . . pass[ed] down without error or interruption,” Kunta Kinte attaches Haley to Africa via Henning, Tennessee, whence originates the “treasured oral history” whose value necessitates the fabrication of Kunta Kinte. The circularity of this logic registers formally in Kunta Kinte’s presence at both ends of the narrative continuum: born in the flesh in sentence one, he is reborn into “faction” nearly six hundred pages later as Haley marks his encounter with the griot as the inception of his own narrative project. On the flight home from Juffure, Haley writes, “I decided to write a book.” “My own ancestors,” he claims, “would automatically also be a symbolic saga of all African-descent people—who are without exception the seeds of someone like Kunta who was born and grew up in some black African village, someone who was captured and chained down in one of those slave ships that sailed them across the same ocean, into some succession of plantations, and since then a struggle for freedom” (580–81). As Linda Williams observes in Playing the Race Card, Haley’s being hailed as “Kinte” by the villagers of Juffure allows him to retrieve “the place in his ancestral life that represents the mythic time before it was ‘too late,’ ” thus recovering, in classic Proustian fashion, “a lost past” in order to “recover his racial virtue as an African and to compensate for a two-hundred-year diaspora through what might be called a positive application of the ‘one-drop rule.’ ” But as Williams suggests, in a provocative argument that complicates Glissant’s critique of atavism, the atavistic work of Kunta Kinte enables a fabricated rootedness in “Home Sweet Africa” that “does not lead merely to a substitute nostalgia for Africa,” but rather “makes possible a deferred cathexis, suspended over several generations, to the new, postslavery Tennessee home—a home that we are given to understand most closely resembles the ideal, cohesive, self-reliant, patriarchal community that had been the Juffure, if not of history, then of Haley’s wishful imagination.” “The accomplishment of Roots,” Williams argues, “is to have exalted the impossibly singular root of

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the past African heritage over the multiple roots of American hybridity, even as it accommodates to a future hybridity and assimilation.” Like Margaret Mitchell and her Georgia plantation, Williams concludes, Haley “constructs a locus of virtue out of the needs of the present.”52 Haley’s territorial claim on Henning-as-Africa thus depends on a double (although deeply imbricated) cathexis of blood and soil. Through bloodline, Haley recovers southern place as simultaneously pre- and post-plantation, as a site of racial purity (“faction”) that, having preceded in its African roots the trauma of the plantation regime, survives it to become a site of assimilation, a “place where one gives-on-and-with.” Nostalgia for a lost (African) past is re-grounded in the utopian topos of Henning, where African roots are grounded in a distinctly American place and story. Within this sequence, Haley relocates the South, as it were, from its traditional place as the origin of an authentic folk to a new place where it fulfills an African genealogy by assuming its position within a multicultural American scene. Although Helen Taylor and Keith Cartwright argue that Haley extends the narrative work of the African griot, I follow Williams in her insistence on the presentist logic of Haley’s narrative practice.53 But the needs of a post–civil rights, post–black nationalist present produced in Haley a form of simulation that reveals the curiously rigorous attitude toward referentiality held by a contemporary audience supposedly accustomed to a flexible boundary between the real and its opposites.54 If Baudrillard’s simulacrum describes the vanishing point at which the real and the fake are no longer differentiated, we should have to conclude from Haley’s disappearance as an African American writer of note that the simulacrum didn’t operate in relation to Roots. One reason is that Haley so fully invested his narrative authority in positivist claims of fact culminating in his fabricated account of the griot in Juffure. Although the reality effect so effected proved extremely powerful to a contemporary audience—it is hard to imagine that the Roots phenomenon would have been the same had its “factionality” been clear from the beginning— it also proved vulnerable to the debunking efforts of Nobile and company. What Williams calls the “embarrassment of Roots” thus depends, at least partly, on the empiricist nature of Haley’s project, which sets up its cathected or fetishized objects as acutely susceptible to decoding—this in stark contrast to narrative projects (Gone with the Wind is paradigmatic here) that situate their fetishes more flexibly within a frame of fantasy and desiring-production. Minus the one (real) drop of African blood, things fall apart.55 Whereas Roots purports to tell the story of an actual genealogy grounded in blood, Julie Dash’s 1992 film Daughters of the Dust tells the story of a plausible genealogy grounded in practice. Blending fact and fantasy, folkway and myth, Dash

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imagines and mobilizes an idea of culture that recovers an African past through southern territory. In numerous particulars, from the recovery of an African “root” that is religiously Muslim and ethnically Mandinka to the repetition of African words as a site of cultural transmission, Dash reworks Haley’s project: without Roots, her Daughters of the Dust is simply inconceivable. Like Roots, although on a much smaller scale, Daughters of the Dust emerged as a phenomenon, spawning a website and two later books, both entitled Daughters of the Dust.56 In other respects, however, Dash swerves markedly from her precursor, most notably, perhaps, in her depiction of a matrilineal culture, but also in the thick representation of culture itself, densely realized in a lush, baroque, visual style that I argue is as artificial as Haley’s historicist fabrications even as its eschews Haley’s linear, genealogical narrative of primordial recovery. While Haley’s narrative project is, at its core, a detective story of beginnings and ends, Dash’s film foregrounds culture as material practice. Through practice, and not in spite of it, the film recovers an atavistic, primordial unity even as it complicates that recovery by pressing its main characters toward the hybridizing pressures of the mainland. Comprising a single day in 1902 as the Peazant family prepares to leave Ibo Landing for the North and modernity, Daughters of the Dust attempts to synthesize what remains unreconciled in Walker’s “Everyday Use”: the competing cultural logics of memory and progress, repetition and innovation. Responding to bell hooks’s assertion that the film’s power derives from “its insistence on a movement away from dependence on ‘reality,’ ‘accuracy,’ ‘authenticity,’ into a realm of the imaginative,” Katherine Henninger counters that “the vexed issue of the ‘real’ of African American experience everywhere haunts Daughters of the Dust.” “The struggle,” Henninger continues, “to define what that ‘real’ will be—the ‘real’ of the ancestral culture of Dawtah Island, or the ‘real’ of the modern, mainland world—is the central conflict for the characters, and Dash’s effort to represent both ‘reals’ in concert is the source of the film’s lyricism and of its discomfort for some critics.”57 The “real” to which I direct my attention here, however, is the real of the filmic present—the “reel real,” if you will—as it both constitutes and mediates the point of suture between cultures African and American. Suspended between past and future and continually foraying into both, this real continually threatens to slip into fantasies of staging that, on the one hand, potentially compromise the film’s reality effect but, on the other, are essential in sustaining its synthesis of memory and progress. Judged by a standard of strict verisimilitude, there is nothing especially realistic about Dash’s film. From the opening sequence that requires its audience, as Frederick Luis Aldama demonstrates, “to abandon the cognitive codes of realistic film” to lingering shots of an almost hyperdocumen-

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tarian quality, Dash’s camera plays with reality at every frame, continually reframing, suspending, and redefining the ontological parameters of the filmic world. As Aldama suggests, “the camera-narrator’s magicoreel effects allow historical and personal memory to seamlessly interweave with the ‘real’ and the ‘magical’ in this narrative present.”58 Special effects generate, as we shall see, distinctive and crucial sequences, while the film’s normative visual style suppresses all evidence of the material deprivations that ostensibly drive, at least in part, the family’s move to the mainland. From clothing to food to individual bodies, life on Ibo Landing is marked by abundance and beauty.59 Real Gullah culture circa 1902 hardly looked this good. At the same time that Dash strives to document an actual way of life, she deploys visual codes that border on the expressionistic.60 Nowhere is this clearer than in the characters’ clothing, which remains pristine even though the characters continually lounge in sand that is far from white.61 With the exception of the boatmen who ferry family members to and from Ibo Island, there is no dirt in the film. The absence of dirt signifies the film’s persistent disavowal of abjection as a condition of island culture. Despite the trauma of the plantation (signaled both visually, in the film’s recurring flashbacks, and discursively, in Nana Peazant’s claim that “this the worst place for born in when it slavery time”) and of contemporary racial violence (especially the rape of Eula Peazant by whites on the mainland), the film’s visual register eliminates all traces of degradation and deprivation.62 Visually, the film thus responds to a recurring motif: the explicitly sexualized threat of being “ruint.” As Eula poignantly declares later in the film, “Deep inside, we believe they ruint our mothers and their mothers what come ‘fore them.” Persistently concerned with reproduction in both the biological and cultural senses of the word, the film meditates on “being ruint” not only as a condition of psychological trauma and shame but as a problem of culture—specifically, its susceptibility to contamination from the outside.63 Reproduction is posed as a plight both of blood and practice, of progeny and culture: how can either, the film asks, sustain continuity when mixture—often violent mixture—is inevitable? How can the roots sunk by hard effort in island dust—the barren soil, Nana Peazant says, that ultimately bears the “fruit of the ancient tree”—be transplanted to the mainland, the site of sexual violence and pressures of cultural assimilation? Thus posed as a problem of transmission, the work of cultural reproduction must surmount a series of threats ranging from rape to Christianity. The imperatives of transmitting culture thus coordinate the film’s mediation on how tradition might survive modernity with a specific narrative crisis: how Eula’s unborn child, who appears magically throughout the film as a young girl,

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will fulfill her mission, as she says, “to convince my daddy that I was his child.” The mission is difficult because Eli is distraught over the rape of his wife, an event he blames on the inability of the “old ways” (here represented by a bottle tree that he later destroys) to protect his family. When Eli angrily confronts Nana Peazant over the failure of her “things,” she responds by linking cultural memory and biological reproduction. “The ancestors and the womb,” she says, “they one, they the same.” The work of the living, she counsels, is to “keep in touch with the dead”: “Never forget who we is, and how far we done come. . . . I’m trying to give you something to take North with you, along with all your great big dreams. . . . Cause when you leave this island, Eli Peazant, you ain’t going to no land of milk and honey.” Offering memory as the antidote to trauma, Nana enjoins Eli to keep the family together and to “celebrate our ways.” Responding angrily that his memories are precisely of trauma, both individual and collective, Eli misses what Nana and the broader logic of the film insist upon—namely, that the protection offered by “our ways” is not so much prophylactic as aesthetic, a set of formal practices by which trauma is recuperated as collective experience. The work of the bottle tree is not, as Eli expects, to protect his wife from sexual violation but to protect the collective “our” from amnesia and fragmentation. Memory, then, maps out a kind of mobile territoriality organized not around possession but practice. Where “our ways” are celebrated, Dash suggests, there will be our home. The narrative practices of memory thus reconcile the two locations of culture mediated by the film: Nana Peazant’s claim that the anthropomorphized terrain of Ibo Landing makes specific territorial demands—“How ya can leave the soil? They’re here in this soil”—and the progressive utopianism of Hagar and Viola, who view the mainland as a land of milk and honey wherein their collective “we” shall overcome the material and spiritual deprivations of life on the island. Against Nana’s rigid territorial demands, they organize a collective project oriented around mobility and ascent. The effort of reconciliation toward which Dash’s film strives is crucially enabled by the unborn child, “guided . . . to the new world” by the “old souls” in a dual effort to assure lineage and to negotiate the hostilities of the opposite camps. In approaching the work of the unborn child as a matter of effects, I want to interrogate how Dash uses this figure to represent cultural work through camera work. As the primary site of special effects in the film, the unborn child moves effortlessly between past, present, and future. Just as she is the only character to appear alongside the slave ancestors, so she is the only character literally to visualize the urban future. In an early scene, the unborn child views through a stereoscopic viewer a street scene from contemporaneous New York City. As she looks, the scene is transformed from static image—presumably three-dimensional

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from her perspective, but not on the big screen—to monochromatic newsreel footage. The shift is significant because the unborn child’s voice (as voiceover) articulates precisely the utopian desires driving the family’s move to the mainland: “It was an age of beginnings, a time of promises. The newspapers said it was a time for everyone, the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless.” Although subtly subverted by history (this is 1902, after all) and the exclusive presence of white faces in the newsreel footage (the only ones in the film), the sentiment is far from irreconcilable with the film’s suggestion that ancestral culture is impervious to modernity and will flourish within it. As Nana Peazant observes in the film and Dash of it, the characters moving to the mainland are born after slavery, and thus expect more than those whose identities were shaped by the plantation regime. In a dense sequence in which she appears first among slaves and then among the Peazant children in 1902, the unborn child takes the literal residue of slavery—the indigo dye that serves as a pervasive marker of the plantation—and with it touches modernity. Dipping her finger in the indigo vats, she returns to the present to touch a Sears Roebuck catalogue, known colloquially as a “wishbook,” as she chooses a teddy bear (“All the Rage,” according to the advertisement). Contact with modern consumer culture materializes as utopian vision, as a literal medium of wish-fulfillment marked by the unborn child as continuous with the ancestral past. The continuity of culture from indigo production to wishbook consumption is further suggested by the aural overlay of “eeenie meenie minie mo,” which sounds among the slaves counting bricks of indigo just prior to its present sounding as the children select their wishes from Sears Roebuck. Enabled by a sophisticated display of filmic technique, this sequence enacts the capacity of visual technologies to represent and reproduce cultural meanings. In its deviation from mimetic representation, the play of Dash’s camera works to narrate the reproduction of culture. In one of the film’s most compelling scenes, Mr. Snead, whom Viola Peazant has brought to document photographically the family’s move to the mainland, is composing a portrait of the Peazant men when, through his viewfinder, he spies the unborn child. As Henninger observes, “If, as Dash has suggested, Mr. Snead stands in for the film’s viewing public, catching a glimpse of the Unborn Child encourages that audience (who has been seeing and hearing the Unborn Child throughout the film) not to dismiss her as filmic fantasy, but to really believe what they are seeing.” “The ‘reality effect’ of Snead’s camera,” Henninger continues, “mirrors the function of Dash’s cinematic camera for her audience: the oral, interpersonal legacy of the ancestors is supplemented, and may ultimately be supplanted, by the power of modern visual representations.”64 The irony here—that Mr. Snead sees more through the camera than

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he does with his own eyes—is extended through Dash’s camera, through which we see more than he does: namely, that the unborn child positions herself next to Eli, thus enacting her mission to persuade him of his paternity. Since Eli can’t see the child and Mr. Snead doesn’t know her identity, the meaning of the sequence is, as it were, for our eyes only. In enacting a sequence and a vision unavailable to anyone within the world of the film, Dash’s camera work depends on a capacity not only to link images as “moving pictures,” but to do so causally. Unlike Snead, whose compositions are limited to a moment in time, Dash composes, through her manipulation of reality effects, sequences that allow the world of the slave ancestors—always a potential site of mystification, amnesia, and disavowal—to connect to the present through distinctively narrative ligatures. Here, a contrast can be drawn between Dash’s narrative form of reality production and Nana’s fetish objects, which materially embody for her the presence of ancestral culture but which the other characters dismiss (sometimes affectionately, sometimes not) as mere “scraps of memories.” Subject to material and cultural decay, Nana’s “things” fail to invoke the ghostly presence of the ancestors as can Dash’s camera; nor do they circulate in any social economy wherein exchange sustains fetish value. For most of the Peazants, the commodity fetishes of Sears Roebuck circulate more powerfully within an economy of utopian expectation than do Nana’s objects in an economy of memory. The material dimension of Nana’s culture has decayed because no one exchanges her objects or believes in them. They remain in her bag, segregated from everyday use, or, like the bottle tree, are rejected as ineffective: either way, they are regarded as relics of a bygone and increasingly useless past. In order to recuperate that past as useful—indeed, as essential—Dash embeds the material dimension of culture in sequences of continuity and cultural reproduction. In The Material Unconscious, Bill Brown observes that the “activity of developing images of the past” must be “analytically produced by a certain kind of attention, concentration, or inhabitation that is unwilling to understand the seemingly inadvertent as genuinely unmotivated.”65 Dash attends in precisely this way to the objects of Gullah culture. In contrast to Haley’s dematerialized simulation of oral history—the passing down of stories unattached to objects—she uses objects to tell stories in an effort to materialize a cultural genealogy. In one scene, for example, the camera lingers over Nana weaving a sea grass basket, the kind of thing one encounters regularly in tourist Charleston. As with the Sears Roebuck catalogue, commodity is subtly recuperated as cultural practice, but without the kind of explicitly intentional register associated with the documentary form. At the same time, such objects cannot merely register as inadvertent or unmotivated lest their position in particular sequences of memory and cultural transmission be occluded.

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This is not to suggest, however, that the film deploys an exclusively preservationist logic. On the contrary, one of the film’s most important sequences shows an object—the figurehead of a slave ship—situated in an equally necessary sequence of forgetting. Again linking the rape of Eula and the violence of the plantation regime, the film here mobilizes the power of stories to work through trauma. As Eula and Eli approach the landing where the figurehead is lodged in the bank, Eula recounts the story from which the island takes its name: It was here they brought em. They took em out de boat right here where we just stand. . . . The minute those Ibo was brought ashore, they just stop, take a look round, not saying a word, just studying the place real good and they seen ting that day that you and I don’t have the power to see. . . . Those Ibo didn’t miss a ting, even seeing you and me standing here talk. When they got through sizing up the place real good and seeing what was to come, my gran say they turn, all of em, and walk back in the water, every last man, ‘oman and child. Now you wouldn’t tink they’d get very far seeing as it was water they was walk on. . . . But chain didn’t stop those Ibo none. They just kept walk like the water was solid ground. When they got to where the ship was, ha, didn’t so much as give it a look, just walk right past it, cause they was going home. Juxtaposed against this sequence is the eyewitness account provided later by Bilal, the Muslim shipmate of the Ibo, who explains to Mr. Snead that the Ibo simply drowned, since “can’t no man walk on water.” But as viewers of the film, our eyes have told us just the opposite, since Eli does precisely that as he approaches the figurehead that has been set adrift, according to Dash, by the power of Eula’s words.66 As special effect, Eli’s walking on water mirrors the cultural effect of the Ibo myth by signaling a corporate resolution of trauma and racial violence. Again, Dash’s camera performs the work of cultural reproduction, the necessity of working through trauma collectively in order to ensure genealogical continuity. As Eli pushes away the figurehead to sink beneath the water on which he walks, he returns to shore and embraces Eula from his knees, thereby signaling his acceptance of the unborn child. They, too, are going home. Whether returning to Africa, moving to the mainland, or remaining on Ibo Island (as Eula and Eli finally do), all movement in Daughters of the Dust is ultimately figured as homecoming. In recuperating dispersal as diaspora, the film mobilizes a transportable ideal of primordial unity, an imagined return to African roots synchronized with an actual migration in the opposite direction—toward the main-

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land and the North. Ibo Landing thus absorbs an especially intentional form of memory that, read critically, appears less as a mimetic register of a world that was than as a motivated act of space-production, an imagined geography that makes it impossible to go anywhere but home. In the film’s climactic scene, Nana Peazant blesses the departing family members by having them kiss her “things” (roots and herbs), which she has wrapped around a Bible. The syncretism enacted by this juxtaposition of objects also enacts a shift, in the words of Henri Lefebvre, “from things in space to the actual production of space,” since the ritual allows those who depart to simultaneously, as Nana says, “remain here with the old souls” even as they take Nana with them to the mainland. If, as Dash says, Ibo Landing is “our Ellis Island,” it is no mere portal to the mainland and American identity, but rather a sacral space where, as the film’s opening sequence announces, “Gullah communities recalled, remembered, and recollected much of what their ancestors brought with them from Africa.” In the total absence of white presence, Ibo Landing is mapped less as a contact zone than as an enclave irreducible to a regime of mechanical reproduction, but one fully capable of surviving within it and, as an effect of the film, generated by it. Set apart as a site where, “as result of their isolation, the Gullah created and maintained a distinct, imaginative, and original African American culture,” Ibo Landing ensures the continuity of African American culture. But it does so not through reiterating a site of continuous cultural memory, but through an active intervention, a consciously realized effort to reverse the effects of information overload. If T. S. Eliot characterized modernity as the loss of wisdom in information, Dash reverses the sequence by reconstituting information—of the kind gathered by a New York director’s research and the assistance of Gullah language consultant Ronald Daise and historical consultant Margaret Washington-Creel— as lore, as part of a living cultural memory. Reproducing knowledge in this way generates what we might call the New Aura, by which I mean to refer to the properties reattached not by advertising but by a selfconscious cultural poetics that recuperates discarded, decayed, or forgotten spaces and objects in an effort to recirculate them within emergent forms of cultural exchange. For African Americans, such efforts have accumulated around everything from African American Heritage cooking to Gee’s Bend quilts, and while the “recovery” of folk tradition (most often a southern folk tradition) embedded in such projects inevitably generates a problematics of authenticity—to which we should add, as Hazel Carby does, a problematics of distraction—I am disinclined to fault them as mere escapist retreats into racially or ethnically inflected illusions of primordial unity. Whereas Keith Cartwright faults Roots (in a critique that could equally apply to Daughters of the Dust) for serving an agenda of “further fragmentation as Ameri-

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cans pursued separate roots in a national craze for genealogy fueled by nostalgia and age-old ideologies of ethnic ‘purity,’ ” I view both texts, as my analyses have suggested, as more flexible engagements with the shifting terrains and territorialities of late modernity—an “anxious age of identity,” in Homi Bhabha’s words, “in which the attempt to memorialize lost time, and to reclaim lost territories, creates a culture of disparate ‘interest groups’ or social movements.” But as Bhabha goes on to argue, such tactics are not inevitable; retroaction through narratives of historical reconstruction can also “reinscribe the past, reactivate it, relocate it, resignify it.” More significantly, he suggests, such retroaction “commits our understanding of the past, and our reinterpretation of the future, to an ethics of ‘survival’ that allows us to work through the present.”67 Even—and perhaps especially—when it generates a past that isn’t what it used to be, retroaction must be understood as action, just as the spatial work of such narratives must be understood as relational even as they carve out enclaves of special significance. That Ibo Landing looks forward to the mainland (itself invisible except in glimpses) is essential to its work in suturing African to American and in figuring the move north as, in one respect, emancipatory. At the same time, memorializing Ibo Landing ensures a kind of tight diaspora, one that can’t get very far from a southern folk and through it to an African tradition. This, ultimately, is the double work of Dash’s film: to loosen tight spaces even as it tightens loose ones. Although there is no reason to imagine such flexible territorialities will ever acquire permanence, there is every reason to believe that they and the South that contains them are going nowhere anytime soon.

chap ter 4 simul ation and civil rights Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle and the Swamp of the Real

In Mark Childress’s Crazy in Alabama (1993), a young protagonist descended from Huck Finn becomes embroiled in a civil rights struggle surrounding the integration of a local swimming pool. During the funeral for a local black activist killed in an earlier protest, Peejoe is captured in a “black-and-white picture of a race riot, a horde of colored people fleeing in panic. In the foreground a white child and a black child huddle together in fear. . . . The camera has captured it all, the terrified crowd blindly fleeing, the miraculous instinct of those children reaching to comfort each other at the heart of the uproar.” The photograph, which ends up on the cover of Life magazine, is “the kind of picture that summed up the whole race question in one vivid image.” In fact, however, Crazy in Alabama depicts the “whole race question” as irreducible to summary, calling into question whether the camera can ever “capture it all.” That the camera captures something is clear enough; from a carefully staged George Wallace photo-op to brief visits from Martin Luther King Jr. that embed a local story in a grand narrative of African American ascent, the media figures Industry, Alabama, as the scene of big news. But if violence in Industry rightly constitutes big news, there is also a kind of violence that the media industry brings to bear in its coverage. In order to ensure the legibility of its story, the media organizes local events through what Linda Williams identifies as the dominant genre of American race relations: racial melodrama. As depicted in the novel, the media’s melodrama of black and white is not a simple distortion; on the contrary, the story in black and white obtains moral resonance and historical magnitude. But it’s not the same story as the local one. From King’s rhetoric, Peejoe learns to regard his Uncle Dove as a “hero” in a “war that had been going on everywhere for a long time now,” but Dove himself is glad to see King leave town: “Dove said Wallace and King could go back to their corners now, take their people with them and leave the people of Industry to sift through the wreckage. . . . Dove said everybody, Negro and white, was going to have to learn to get along all over again.” The TV trucks, meanwhile, have departed to cover the sensational trial of Peejoe’s Aunt Lucille, who has decapitated her abusive husband, transported his head in Tupperware to Hollywood, and briefly made it big as a guest star on The Beverly Hillbillies. After the trial, the media departs the traumatized town for good.1

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Crazy in Alabama thus depicts acting, which originally appears as a special kind of human behavior, as ultimately penetrating all human behavior. All the world’s a stage, even the world of racial struggle, although the performance involved does not lessen—and often clarifies—the real stakes of the drama. In its concern with representing civil rights, Childress’s novel takes up what has become as well a central topic of scholarly investigation. In Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, J. Mills Thornton argues that the grand narrative of civil rights bears only a tenuous relation to the micronarratives of local municipal politics that constitute the real story of civil rights. Using as case studies three cities intimately associated with the career of Martin Luther King Jr., Thornton argues that King’s genius in identifying “the particular and the political with the emphatically moral and eternal” both mobilized collective effort and generated utopian expectations of a promised land that ultimately foundered on reality itself.2 Against the celebrated marches that symbolized mass aspiration, Thornton privileges the pedestrian politics of alliance-building, polarization, selfinterest, and incremental progress. Crazy in Alabama captures something of this dynamic. Upon arriving in Industry for his first appearance, King concedes that he “may not have been here to fight this battle with you,” but he goes on to clarify its meaning by mapping it against not only the other battlefields of the civil rights struggle—Greensboro, Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham—but the battlefield at Gettysburg and the promised land of the Israelite Canaan. “It was all so simple when King explained it,” Peejoe explains. “It was as plain as the difference between a white man and a Negro, between night and day, sight and blindness, right and wrong.”3 Although King’s account offers moral legibility read against a world historical background, there is a back story, too—one whose intimate, local consequences are suppressed in King’s heroic narrative. Legibility has its price. In both fiction and fact, the real story of the civil rights struggle inevitably emerges as a contested narrative. Mediating by necessity both local and national terrains, factionalism and corporate effort, interest and ideal, any single account confronts the dangers of reductionism on the one hand and hyper-specificity on the other. Complicating such efforts is the demand for authoritative versions of what is surely the most commemorated social movement in American history, rivaled only by the Civil War and perhaps the American Revolution as a compelling object of national memory. Increasingly venerated in historical museums and other public displays, the civil rights movement is pressured toward moral legibility even as basic questions remain hotly debated by historiographers. Where, for example, did the civil rights movement occur? Between a national scene and a local one, the South figures in most accounts, but again, more questions are

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raised. How is the South figured? As a collection of representative types? The usual (white) suspects come to mind immediately: the redneck and the fat sheriff are the bad guys, the principled aristocrat (Gavin Stevens-cum-Gregory Peck-as-Atticus Finch ) and the white child with the heart of gold (Huck Finn-cum-Peejoe) are the local good guys, with the idealistic liberal acting as the good guy imported from the North. (The typology of the usual black suspects is equally rigorous, if less varied, ranging from the “too-cold” colored quisling to the “too-hot” Afrocentric radical, with the “ just-right” middle occupied by King and his nonviolent followers.) Why, moreover, tell about the South as the stage or scene of American civil rights in the first place? Because the tactic serves, as any number of commentators have argued, a national project of disavowing racism as a “southern problem”? Because the South really was—is—worse? The obvious answer (“both”) is suggested by Malcolm X’s famous assertion that “Mississippi” was anywhere in the United States south of the Canadian border; that he chose Mississippi and not Minnesota was not arbitrary. Exacerbating the difficulties in culling resonant scenes and tropes from the civil rights archive is the almost inexhaustible nature of the archive itself. Documented, photographed, reported, recorded, and filmed from day one, the civil rights movement accumulated an unprecedented mass of data—a kind of information overload, if you will—from which a highly selective catalogue survives in the national memory. Of the “kind of picture that summed up the whole race question in one vivid image,” most Americans can call to mind two or three; the same is true of stories and sound clips. With such informational Darwinism at work, it is hardly surprising that V. S. Naipaul, whose racism is latent at best, consigns his encounter with civil rights activists to a kind of electronic unreality. My premise in this chapter is broad and self-evident: that one use of the South is as the setting, for good and for ill, of the story of civil rights. As self-described “Yankee journalist” Jacob Levenson puts it in a 2004 article pondering whether the South is indeed “another country” or simply a “Place to Stow National Problems,” “When we do think of [the South] it is often frozen in time: Martin Luther King Jr. marching on Selma or Sheriff Bull Connor’s men spraying fire hoses on civil rights marchers. Those are the images rehashed on PBS, anyway.”4 My inquiry, however, is quite narrow: how does a single novel, Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle (1993) engage the problems of representing a single scene in that story? How does it re-mediate an already hyper-mediated event, the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, characterized by David Halberstam as “the first great media event of the civil rights movement”?5 How does it extract images from the South’s tropological archive, refigure them, and embed them in causal sequences? How, at the broadest level, does its peculiar relation to reality attempt to rearrange the unrealities that con-

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stitute its cultural field? On this point, let me be clear: if the specter of unreality haunts the stories and iconography of the civil rights movement, it pales in comparison with the unreality in which white southerners dwelled prior to the movement’s eruption, a point neatly illustrated by Donald Davidson’s 1937 review of John Dollard’s Caste and Class in a Southern Town. Despite its being “a little hard for a Southerntowner to get Dr. Dollard’s notion straight in his head,” Davidson does his best: “The whole thing is, [Dollard] says, an enormous conspiracy of the dominant whites to keep themselves in the relative position they enjoyed when the whites were masters and the Negroes were slaves. White society, we must understand, is organized around a fiction which establishes whites as the superior caste and Negroes as the inferior caste.” Dollard sees fiction and conspiracy; Davidson sees a “modus vivendi.”6 A generation later and from the other side of color line, James Baldwin verifies Davidson’s palpable sense of bewilderment. Commenting on the aftermath of the Montgomery bus boycotts, Baldwin recalls that “the whites, beneath their cold hostility, were mystified and deeply hurt. They had been betrayed by the Negroes, not merely because the Negroes had declined to remain in their ‘place,’ but because the Negroes had refused to be controlled by the town’s image of them. And without this image, it seemed to me, the whites were abruptly and totally lost. The very foundations of their private and public worlds were being destroyed.”7 Image, fiction, modus vivendi, foundation: the ideas, as we shall see, recur and resonate in a narrative that represents the South’s traumatized terrain through the most unrealistic of means. l In Wolf Whistle, the national media descends on Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, in the aftermath of a race murder. Surveying a terrain predetermined by mass culture, the reporters are disappointed when their offer of two dollars “just to hear a verse or two of ‘Old Man River’ by an authentic soul of the South” is refused by “colored men [who] said they couldn’t recollect ever having heard of that song.”8 The southern landscape they import is not only quaint, it is abject—pre-themed as the very abyss of American economic and cultural backwardness. The reporters conclude that “Faulkner was only a reporter”—“only,” as one puts it, “the camera’s eye” (214). The uncanny thing about the reporters is that they, too, are only reporters: there is a disorienting similarity between the mediascape they import and the landscape already overdetermined by local arrangements. When a local man repeats a joke about “a nigger trying to swim across Roebuck with a gin fan he had stolen,” he is chagrined to find his words on the front page of the New York

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Times represented as if “he actually believed this to be true” (218). There is distortion here, but there’s a good dose of truth, too: it’s hardly clear that the joke told as truth is any worse than the joke told as such. As the reporter says, “It wasn’t much of a joke” (218). When the local man complains that “all this attention you been giving to this little town is about as bad as a durn nigger murder,” the resulting headline reads, “DELTA MAN SAYS REPORTING TRUTH THE SAME AS MURDER” (219). Again, journalistic distortion reproduces a truth—the horrific moral equivalence of the original statement—that hits close to home. As “amazing” as the degraded and abject South appears to the reporters, there is an uncanny resonance to the regional imagery they disseminate to the nation. Unlike the media’s Faulkner, Lewis Nordan is no reporter. Like the media that describes Faulkner, his distortion of an overdetermined cultural terrain reproduces an uncanny landscape—at once recognizable and deformed beyond recognition. In an essay on Faulkner and magical realism, Philip Weinstein offers a useful paradigm for thinking about Wolf Whistle’s hyper-reportage of, as Nordan puts it, a “magical landscape just askew of the real, historical universe,” a “created planet [that] doesn’t quite square with the world I live in.”9 Repeating the trope of Faulkner-as-reporter, Weinstein proposes that Faulkner’s “Newton-descended commitment to mimesis that he inherits from realism” impedes his reconfiguring the “cultural loom,” “the warp and woof of social space and time.” “Faulkner’s only available swerve,” Weinstein writes, “is not to write another plot but to jam the inherited one. . . . Rather than reshape his culture’s arrangements, Faulkner shows, with ceaseless repercussion, how and why they must collapse.” In contrast, Weinstein argues, the tradition of magical realism allows Gabriel García Márquez not merely to jam the loom but to reconfigure it, rewriting “Faulkner’s ‘might-have-been’ as ‘what might be,’ on a canvas wherein the human figure is once again furnished with self-enacting moves within cooperative time and space.”10 Despite Nordan’s claim that during the six weeks it took to write the novel “I had become a magical realist, and was grateful to Latin America for making me possible,” Wolf Whistle is not especially indebted either to magical realism’s cultural archive or its characteristic synthesis of the magical and the real.11 In narrative practice, realism is exiled well beyond the town limits of Arrow Catcher, themselves marked by a fictitious sign branding the town as “A GOOD PLACE TO RAISE A BOY.” That such a sign actually existed in Sumner, Mississippi, where Till’s killers were tried, hardly matters, so radically does Nordan’s hyper-reportage submerge historical detail in what he calls “a phantasmagoria based upon history’s broadest outline.”12 Still, magic is at work in Arrow Catcher, and it acquires, as we shall see, transformative power despite being radically circumscribed by the cultural terrain in which it op-

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erates. Of “el mundo de Faulkner,” Carlos Fuentes said that “sólo lo legado será legible” (“only what is inherited is legible”);13 in el mundo de Nordan, inherited social praxis and its legible signs of culture exert a massive resistance against which Nordan mobilizes what I want to call hyperlegibility, an excessively readable stylistics that decodes through overcoding—pre-collapsing, as it were, cultural arrangements by having always, already submitted them to simulation. In broadly interrogating, then, the internal logic of Nordan’s virtual South, I argue that Wolf Whistle does not constitute a Baudrillardian murder of the real, but rather deploys simulation to recover the cultural meaning of a real murder. There, of course, lies the rub. In staging his reality experiment against the loaded subject matter of the Emmett Till murder, Nordan courts the verdict delivered by a reviewer that he “had trivialized an American tragedy.”14 As Randall Kenan puts it, “Some may initially find themselves morally outraged: the very idea that an action so heinous, so unconscionably barbaric might in any wise be used for comedy.”15 In Playing the Race Card, Linda Williams observes, after noting her own study’s “lack of an account of the workings of racial melodrama in the era of civil rights,” that the genre underwent a transition during this period in which the most “convulsive” melodramas “of black and white moved from the domain of fictional text to historical events.”16 Nordan works in the opposite direction, reinscribing “real history” in a fictional text that makes The Beverly Hillbillies seem, by contrast, the most scrupulous sort of documentary realism. What does it mean, then, for a white author not only to appropriate the tragedy of Emmett Till for fiction but to do so using a cast of characters copied from the low end of the culture industry? It’s not, after all, that history (itself) repeats itself—first as tragedy, then as farce—but that this text repeats tragedy as farce, substituting for Till and his white murderers a cast of characters borrowed from Jeff Foxworthy, Amos and Andy, and any number of B-movies. In The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Rey Chow calls attention to the capacity of stereotype to conflate “the conventional and formulaic, on the one hand, and the creative and the original/originating, on the other.”17 According to Chow, stereotype is itself subject to stereotype as a merely reductive way of representing social groups, a move that represses the complex cultural work of reductionism itself. In his creative deployment of what I want to call the hypertype, by which I mean stereotype that has entered the domain of the simulacrum proper,18 Nordan attempts simultaneously to render legible and decode the character slots available in his fictional terrain. Here, for example, is the effete southern aristocrat Lord Poindexter Montberclair addressing the epitome of white trashhood, Solon Gregg: “Decent whitefolks have always needed the likes of you . . . to help keep our niggers in line. . . . It gives you lower classes, you white-trash boys, some

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raison d’être, wouldn’t you say so?” (118). In a similar key, Auntee and Uncle distill a distinctive genealogy of racial stereotype, just as Alice Conroy excessively embodies the figure of the idealistic white liberal. Of the ubiquitous fat sheriff with a cowboy hat, Jack Butler has warned contemporary writers to “try getting away with using one as a character”; in the figure of Sheriff Trippett, “as big as a walrus” and with a “white Stetson hat on his head” (237, 235), Nordan tries.19 The cumulative effect of the hypertype—and in particular, its recycling of character types already cycled through endless iterations of race narrative—is to induce a kind of comic nausea.20 There’s a lot that’s funny in Wolf Whistle, but at second glance, the humor often turns out to be not so funny after all. By looping endlessly through the cultural archive of degraded representations, Nordan tries to imagine a way out of the endless loop of culture; his deployment of cultural reproductions seeks, in short, to short-circuit the reproduction of culture and its nauseating inertia. In excavating racial trauma by (paradoxically) reducing history and its actors to the thinnest of surfaces, Wolf Whistle attempts to recuperate moral legibility and utopian traction beyond the impoverished and formulaic register of melodrama. Having suggested, then, that Nordan’s use of the hypertype constitutes a kind of post-melodramatic style or mode, I want to begin exploring how the narrative brings this style to bear in disrupting the degraded and degrading reality of Arrow Catcher, Mississippi. l The “great exotic” African parrot whose “wild and magical ascent” and “incredible descent” ends on the fire-scarred scalp of Solon Gregg, where it “shit . . . great farting blobs of liquid white bird dooky” (255), is no ordinary bird. Let us call it a hyperparrot. That it gets off the ground is no mean feat, so overloaded is it with meaning: literary allusion (as the thrice-circling weaver of “Kubla Khan” and, less overtly, the albatross of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”), racial valence (as an “African parrot, generations closer to their shared homeland than Uncle himself” [250]), and mock epic resonance (“oh deep, deep, deep the piston plunges of those sad wings, long the distance that each stroke took the bright bird along” [251]). But what is important is not so much what the bird means as what it does, since in depositing excrement where it belongs—white dooky, no less: “White! it seemed to say, White, white, white!” (255)—the hyperparrot disrupts the social logic of excrement that has existed to this point in the narrative. Wolf Whistle is, literally, full of shit, and through excrement it figures communal strategies of regulating reality. In altering the terrain of the real, the hyperparrot’s defecation is, in a curious way, the action for which the narrative has been preparing us all along.

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Writing of the disposal of excrement, Slavoj Žižek argues that “the Real is not primarily the horrifyingly-disgusting stuff reemerging from the toilet sink, but rather the hole itself, the gap which serves as the passage to a different ontological order—the topological hole or torsion which ‘curves’ the space of our reality so that we perceive/imagine excrements as disappearing into an alternative dimension which is not part of our everyday reality.”21 Like Mary Douglas in her classic analysis of pollution in Purity in Danger, Žižek calls attention to how the disposal of excrement enacts normative schemes of social regulation.22 Although I want to consider momentarily two characters, Smoky Viner and Alice Conroy, whose threat to social order is figured through their relation to excrement, I want to consider briefly the context of Žižek’s comments, made in an analysis of The Matrix. Although the virtual Matrix of that film and the fictional setting of Arrow Catcher may appear to share little in common—in fact, there are positive differences23 — the underlying theme of a perniciously coded “reality” connects the two locales. As Žižek observes, the Matrix merely “radicalizes” through its use of virtual reality the older idea of a “totally manipulated and controlled artificial universe.”24 In the final scene of The Matrix, Neo defeats his antagonist, Agent Smith, when he is able to perceive the Matrix, which hitherto has appeared “real,” as the constitutive green computer code previously visible only in Zion, where it can be seen but not altered. The parallel with Wolf Whistle lies precisely in this: “reality” must become hyperlegible in order to obtain agency in relation to it. Perhaps the most horrific thing about Arrow Catcher is that it makes sense to most of those who live there, and it does so because it makes sense for them. Although many characters have a nagging sense, as does Neo in the film, that things somehow “aren’t right,” they tend to be, prior to Bobo’s murder, passive consumers of the reality it produces. The hyperparrot intervenes in this scenario by decoding (with white bird dooky analogous to green computer code) the community’s normative practices of waste disposal through which, in turn, social regulation has been practiced. In the courtroom, then, “shit happens” differently from how it happens in the social field of the novel, where, following the logic of the colloquialism, “horrifyingly-disgusting stuff” disappears into an alternative dimension which is not part of everyday reality (“shit happens, let’s move on”). The repressive praxis surrounding excrement explains why a shocking assertion is met with the rejoinder, “Why don’t you just shit right in the middle of your dinner plate?” (264). It contextualizes the pigeon who observes Bobo’s violation of taboo and “took himself a good long shit” (36). It elucidates why Alice Conroy, who observes the white spectators at the trial as an “abomination” of “white, white, bird dooky, white” (226), takes her fourth-grade class on a field trip “motor[ing] through liquid shit at the

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sewage reservoir” (229), where she instructs them that the “disposal of human waste is the responsibility of the brokenhearted” (247). (It’s not that there’s an actual lesson to be learned, only that reality need be confronted, even as mediated through Alice’s grotesquely sentimental idiom.) Most importantly, perhaps, it explains why Smoky Viner, the human battering ram who smashes consensus by declaring that he is “for the nigger” (204), self-identifies as a smasher of “shithouses” (203). In this crucial episode, which Nordan claims to be based on an actual incident,25 Smoky Viner refuses to partake of the humor that keeps things in their place: The joke was that a nigger had tried to steal a gin fan and swim across the lake with it. Kids were laughing about these jokes all day long. Roy Dale sure did laugh, whoo boy, Roy Dale got a kick out of all these jokes. What was even better, though, was when he found somebody who hadn’t heard one of them, then he could tell the joke his ownself, make somebody else laugh, too. Now that was something. “Stole a gin fan and was trying to swim across the lake with it!” he would say. Everybody was laughing. (200) The laughter is overdetermined because, like the gin fan tied around Bobo’s neck, it constitutes an attempt to dispose of the black body. But nobody is laughing when Smoky declares that “it ain’t right” (205); indeed, “you couldn’t keep anything nice with Smoky Viner around” (203). Butting shithouses and ruining the joke thus acquire symmetry as threats to social hygiene, impediments to regulatory efforts to “assur[e] that the record was straight” (206). After Smoky Viner, who brings disgusting stuff to the light of day, “there weren’t any more jokes” (206). A similar critique of humor occurs in the African American community when Blue John Jackson jokes that, instead of Arrow Catcher, “what’d be bad was if they name this here town Spear Chunker” (101). Decoding the humor, Rufus McKay responds that “you make a joke like that and jess part of the problem, Blue John. You part of the reason that child [Bobo] done put his life in danger” (102). After Rufus McKay, there aren’t any more jokes either. Jokes are part of the problem because they enact communal strategies to regulate reality by repressing—better, flushing—the horrific and traumatic nature of things. In the short-circuiting of humor in these two scenes, we recognize the narrative’s broader strategies of exhausting the joke. Stylistically, the repetitious nature of humor—as in, for example, Runt and Peeter Skeeter’s interminable riffs on

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the joke of the seeing-eye parrot (239–40)—teaches us that if the joke wasn’t funny the first time, it’s even less so after that. The exhaustion of humor is important because jokes constitute a primary mode of plugging into a static social world with a pathological need to keep things (including persons) in their place. But even here, humor fails to connect individuals, even in pernicious ways: increasingly, the narrative charts a decline in its ability to protect individuals from the isolation and despair that constitute the novel’s primary subjective register. Roy Dale circulates the joke of the gin fan because he is acutely attuned to the syndrome. For Roy Dale, shooting an arrow isn’t just shooting an arrow: “The arrow was not an arrow, but only something from inside himself, some abstraction requiring sudden and violent expulsion, expression, before it killed him, a representation of landscapes of the broken heart, hopeless dreams, a vastness of sorrow that outside of himself might be seen as beautiful and strange, but that inside of him was only poison and filth” (193). Like his father, Runt, who “wanted to throw the emptiness inside him out into space” (153), Roy Dale desires to expel or displace his abject sense of himself, an act he attempts by shooting Smoky Viner, who’s ruined his joke, in the forehead with a blunt arrow, a “density of meaning” that, “when it flew, was, as he had known it would be, all his rage, his emptiness and loss, outward, outward, forever away from his heart” (209, 208). The arrow, however, has unintended consequences. At the moment of its impact, the “body of the Bobo-child . . . reversed all its decay” (208), Roy Dale envisions the possibility that “his vile laughter at the death of a child, like himself, did not eliminate him from human hope” (209), and the unconscious body of Smoky Viner, himself consigned to the cartoonish experience of “tiny bluebirds flying around and around his head” (209), engenders for the gathered boys a utopian vision: They saw a boy with courage to speak words that they had not had courage even to think. They saw hope. For themselves, for the Delta, for Mississippi, maybe the world. (210) In a narrative that has conditioned us to read sentiment as always, already ironized or hypercoded, the intrusion of a straightforward language of moral hope is jarring. Although the logic of the code shift is opaque, it is clear is that things have changed: innovation itself has erupted in a socionarrative field hitherto governed by repetition ad nauseam. But in order to understand the shift, we shall have to backtrack a bit.

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l In “Growing Up White in the South,” Nordan describes Wolf Whistle as existing “on a plane, sometimes comic, even burlesque, just askew of the ‘real,’ historical universe.” Such a novel, he claims, “where the ground of reality is so unstable, so likely to shift away from conventional expectations of reality,” demands a “moral center . . . firm ground on which a reader may stand in complete confidence that it will not move”: “Emmett (Bobo, in the fiction) and his family are the moral, emotional, psychological, life-affirming core of this novel, which a reader may trust to be permanent, and around which all the rest of the world may go mad. The aesthetic need to maintain this solid ground was manifested in my early reluctance to change even the smallest details of my memory of the real event, including Emmett’s name.”26 On the face of it, this is an astonishing claim, not least because Nordan’s “evidence” (that he used Emmett’s name in early drafts) is absent from the text. What’s in the text, conversely, hardly substantiates Nordan’s assertions. If, as he says, “everyone in my story, except Emmett, [was] fair game for irony and satire and caricature,” then how do we account for the fourteen-yearold—“fote-teen he pronounced it” (22)—“spote” bragging of his “Eye-talian” gold ring and white girlfriend, and making the girls squeal by asking, “Who want to look at my lizard” (23)? If anything, Bobo appears as an exaggerated version of the hypertype, complete with minstrel dialect, excessive regard for sexuality, and dubious intellect (of his lizard-skin wallet, for example, he wonders how “they find a lizard big enough to put your money and your pitchers in” [23]). For their part, Auntee and Uncle register in the same burlesque idiom as everyone else, inviting their nephew’s incipient executioner in for a cup of “frush coffee” and wondering of the “Blue Men” who freed the slaves, “How do a white man turn blue, anyway?” (142). It’s not that Nordan’s deployment of minstrelsy and burlesque isn’t strategic,27 but that it hardly places Bobo and his family on “terra firma.” Although it is tempting to dismiss Nordan’s claim as an act of retroactive piety, I want to argue that Bobo’s death—the “real event” to which Nordan refers—acquires something of the centrality he claims for it by short-circuiting the social machines by which the white community codes and regulates reality. Where Neo in The Matrix is welcomed to Baudrillard’s “desert of the Real,” Nordan offers something like a swamp of the real, by which I refer not only to the literal swamp of the novel (where reality, as we shall see, is radically suspended), but also to the narrative’s broader strategy of swamping the real through excessive coding. Through what I have called the novel’s hyperlegible stylistics, Nordan indexes a degraded reality as if to register, at

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every instance, the nauseating properties of social surfaces. Bobo’s corpse decodes that “reality” by rendering visible the trauma it strives to contain or repress. In Arrow Catcher, trauma is omnipresent as an absent cause. In a consideration of Lévi-Strauss and the organization of social space, Žižek cautions against associating the “real” with the “actual arrangement” of space. Instead, Žižek proposes that the Real resides in a traumatic kernel, a “disavowed X on account of which our vision of reality is anamorphically distorted.” In this “Real that distorts our perception of reality,” Žižek identifies the Lacanian big Other, “the virtual symbolic order, the network that structures reality for us.”28 The spatial arrangement of Arrow Catcher inscribes the residue of such a traumatic distortion. Spatially, Arrow Catcher is divided into “Scumtown” (where the white trash live) and “Niggertown,” both of which are located on the site of “a significant Mississippi defeat” during the Civil War (68) and haunted by a flock of buzzards originally attracted by the “corpse-stench” of decaying bodies. (Nordan isn’t subtle here. That the buzzards are named Bilbo, Vardaman, and so on “after past and future governors and senators of the sovereign state of Mississippi” [69] renders hyperlegible the carrion politics of racial demagoguery.) That Scumtown and Niggertown are also known as Balance Due and the Belgian Congo, respectively, suggests how the community’s strategies of constructing the abject other parallel the logic of the joke, since as textual bad jokes in precisely the sense of Bobo and the gin fan, Balance Due and the Belgian Congo reproduce humor ad nauseam while indexing the economic violence—figured in the latter instance as colonialist exploitation29 — underlying them both. In the consensual hallucination of Arrow Catcher—and we should pause to reiterate that the hallucination is foundational within the world of the novel—Nordan extrapolates from the real (historical) South a hyper-South whose traumatic origins couldn’t be clearer. Although inside of Arrow Catcher there is of course a Belgian Congo, a buzzard named Bilbo, and this or that other feature, Nordan’s stylistics ensure that these features register in a grotesque key. Hyperlegibility thus emerges as a form of legible distortion, a “readable” record of trauma that, whatever its origin, ultimately terminates in the abject other whose disposal or segregation preserves the white community’s social hygiene.30 Because he is culturally illiterate, Bobo violates the scripts maintaining this hygiene, thereby generating an overdetermined response—overdetermined, that is, after Solon ensures its legibility31—that eventually collapses communal strategies of fashioning the abject other. In her pathbreaking analysis of abjection, Julia Kristeva proposes that the abject accumulates where boundaries are violated in a way that does not permit a neat separation of subject and object. The abject, according to Kristeva, is “something rejected from which one does not part, from

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which one does not protect oneself as from an object.” For this reason, the corpse “is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life.” Existing “on the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me,” the “abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.”32 Decoding abjection in precisely these terms, Nordan deploys a kind of cultural antiprimer, a counter-hallucinatory strategy that, rather than reinscribing the abject within some regime of “realism,” deploys the abject as a critical wedge into his culture’s coding of the body and of space. In the swamp of the real, Nordan reproduces the corpse as a hyperlegible index of trauma that opens alternative spaces and scenarios. Whereas the white community’s humor attempts to reduce Bobo’s corpse to a punch line, Nordan’s stylistics insist that the procedure is incomplete: a residue of empathy remains, preventing the community’s parting from his “tattered corpse” as from an object. Borrowing a horrific detail from the actual murder of Emmett Till, Nordan locates the nexus of abjection—the uncanny site of Bobo’s liminal position between subject and object—in Bobo’s “demon eye,” which “Solon’s bullet had knocked from its socket” (175). While the historical impact of Emmett Till is attributable, at least in part, to the public display of his mutilated body, Nordan endows the demon eye with the magical capacity to envision alternative worlds. From the swamp where Solon discards Bobo’s corpse, the demon eye sees “what Bobo could not see in life, transformations, angels and devils, worlds invisible to him before death” (175). In Bobo’s corpse, then, rather than in his “character,” we can locate something like the novel’s “core”—not as a “firm ground” but instead as a trauma driving the vertiginous collapse of social foundations. In a world where the demon eye is possible—both as the effect of racial practices (that make it possible to shoot an eye out under these circumstances) and narrative practices that have always, already imploded verisimilitude as an aesthetic norm—the real is not the “actual” Bobo any more than it is the “actual” Arrow Catcher, but instead the trauma (hitherto repressed through social coding) that Bobo’s corpse renders hyperlegible. Put another way, the appearance of Bobo’s corpse both explains the presence of the hyperreal (as the excessive residue of trauma) and works to collapse the hyperreal’s internal logic. The demon eye thus not only emerges as the inevitable outcome of the world of the novel but actively decodes that world—in particular, its strategies of regulating reality through its coding of the abject. This dynamic is especially evident in the two murderers, Lord Montberclair and Solon Gregg, both of whom use Bobo as a surrogate victim on which they attempt, ineffectively, to displace traumatic scenarios originating elsewhere. Lord Montberclair is distressed over his wife Sally Anne’s affair with Hoyty-Toyty McCarty, “known” to be the “biggest

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goddamn queer Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, ever produced” (113). When Lord Montberclair proposes to kill Bobo, Solon initially misunderstands the victim: “At first Solon thought Lord Montberclair was asking him to murder Hoyty-Toyty McCarty for him, the organist. That was the distinct impression Solon was receiving about the gist of this whole conversation” (116). For his part, Solon is despondent over his son (grotesquely burned during an attempt at parricide) and his sister (sexually abused by their father and currently a prostitute in New Orleans). “Kill Somebody, you’ll feel better” is the message Solon receives (from somewhere) (105). But if killing somebody promises cathartic pleasure—and Solon becomes positively giddy envisioning murder’s utopian possibilities—it turns out to be not so much fun after all. For Lord Montberclair, the pleasures of displacement are compromised when he discovers that Bobo carries a photograph not of Sally Anne but of the actress Hedy Lamarr, thus making the killing “pointless.” “You fucking white trash fool,” he scolds Solon. “You led me to believe that this was a picture of my wife” (145). Similarly, Solon’s attempt to configure the murder as a friendly fishing expedition—a clever decoding of the farce of interracial “civility”33 —is ruined when Bobo evinces “an unexpected rude streak” (169) and shoots him with a gun he has discarded. After killing Bobo, Solon is “too durn tired and wounded to think about anything, much,” having “forgotten all about his big plans” (179–80). So goes the promise of regeneration by violence. As Gail Weiss observes, “the construction of the abject other ultimately represents our (unsuccessful) attempt to repudiate our own abjection.”34 In precisely this sense, the killing of Bobo fails miserably for all involved. Because Bobo’s murder cannot be reabsorbed through normative practices of coding, it reveals the entropic nature of recycled trauma—its tendency to break down as a social machine. But if Wolf Whistle represents cultural arrangements as overdetermined and stylistically pre-collapsed, it offers more tentatively a logic by which they might be rearranged. It is clear enough that Bobo’s body makes things fall apart; Coach Heard identifies a widely diffused experience when he says, “I never knowed about this emptiness inside me, until that little colored boy got killed and Solon and Dexter got let loose” (273). What is less clear is how Bobo’s body is put together again when Smoky Viner refuses the joke: “The body of the Bobochild, dressed in a heavy garment of fish and turtles and violent death, reversed all its decay, and flesh became firm once more . . . [B]ad manners and disrespect and a possessive disdain for a woman became mere child’s play, a normal and decent testing of adolescent limits in a hopeful world” (208–9). Here, the resurrection of the body parallels the equally magical production of a social world that would judge Bobo’s actions for what they are: “mere child’s play” exempted from the trau-

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matic cycle of abjection and violence. That world, however, never comes to pass. Because of its swamping of reality, Wolf Whistle lacks a stable ground in which social progress might gain traction. In Arrow Catcher there is, in a manner of speaking, no there there, no civic or discursive medium that might sustain utopian momentum. More precisely, we might say that only utopian momentum can be sustained. Nordan’s formal solution to this paradox is, as we shall see, to conjure a magic severed from realism and the prison house of verisimilitude. The problem then becomes how the magic of Bobo’s demon eye and the swampy world of “eternal music” might plug into the dissonant world of the living. l Midway through the novel, as Alice Conroy envisions Bobo’s horrific fate in a magical raindrop, she recognizes “the futility of magic to change anything of importance in the world” (159). At the trial, however, the hyperparrot casts “a green shade upon everyone seated in the room, especially Alice and the children, whose lives it changed forever, repaired all damage, and proved the magic of sudden and eternal transformations of the spirit” (254). The paradoxical relation of magic’s futility and its transformative power is resolved when we perceive the separate domains in which magic operates. In the world of the law, the hyperparrot makes nothing happen: Solon and Lord Montberclair are “set free, as most folks spected they would be, without apology or logic or shame” (257). But in Nordan’s “magical landscape just askew of the real, historical universe,” eternal transformations of the spirit exist as a distinct possibility. As we have said, the swamping of the real acts as a precondition for the emergence of utopian energies, to which we must now add that such energies operate in a fragile and contingent way. At the conclusion of the novel, they indeed operate in a parallel universe. As Sally Anne Montberclair and Alice Conroy encounter a crystal ball, the narrative moves in an explicitly speculative direction: “Nobody but Bobo knows for sure what happened next, but maybe, behind Alice and Sally Anne, the crystal ball in Swami Don’s Elegant Junk shone with the bright blue light of empty interiors and of faraway and friendly stars and all their hopeful planets and golden moons” (290). The problem, of course, is what to make of a utopianism mapped on friendly stars and not in Mississippi. To put the matter this way restates the paradox of utopianism itself, as simultaneously “good place” (eutopia) and “no place” (outopia). But as critics of utopianism are fond of affirming, the idea of utopia is (whatever Richard Weaver would say) one of those ideas with consequences—a concept that continually, as Fredric Jameson puts it, “returns upon our present to play a diagnostic and critical-

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substantive role.”35 My concern here, however, is less with the practical effects of Nordan’s utopianism on the real world that with the diagnostic logic of what I want to call the magic of the swamp of the real—that is, the emergence of utopian energies (organized under the aegis of “magic”) from a specific constellation of representational strategies (organized under the aegis of the hyperreal). Considering what she calls our “our melodramatic racial fix,” Linda Williams persuasively argues that race melodramas “quest to forge a viscerally found moral legibility in the midst of moral confusion and disarray,” thereby gesturing “toward inexpressible attributes of good and evil no longer expressible in a post-sacred era.”36 Wolf Whistle, I suggest, reads such moral legibility as complicit in a regime of formal containment, by which I mean the tendency of mass culture to produce civil rights narratives that generate moral-aesthetic gratification (a moment of triumph, interracial reconciliation, poignant tragedy, and so forth) tacitly understood as being contained in the text, since our world and its racial configurations are somewhat more muddled. In contrast, Nordan’s conclusion seeks to protect race trauma from the violence of the happy ending, wherein the image of Bobo’s corpse might be reintegrated within “this” world in some artificially gratifying way. By positing its absolute alterity, the narrative sustains the image’s capacity to resist the trauma of documentation and pedagogy, thereby enacting what Baudrillard calls the silent consecration of the image, which can only occur if the image is captured in “suspense of meaning . . . at the first encounter,” the “ephemeral” instant when things “have not yet been arranged by analytical order.”37 Nordan preserves this ephemerality by fixing (another paradox) Bobo’s demon eye in the surreal flux of the swamp, where he is attended by eternal music, visions of “transformations,” and solicitous bass who provide “deep comfort to the murdered child who was now their friend and their food” (185). The sequence of decay and regeneration enacts nature’s reproductive resources, its magical pedagogy of “Begin again” (150) to which culture remains depressingly impervious. Where the cotton fields ask “Shouldn’t our ancient suffering be more fruitful by now?” (150), culture’s answer, to date, is no: its ancient suffering produces only strange fruit. It is appropriate, then, that the flux of swamp attends Bobo’s demon eye as it sees a “crystal ball, lost in the depths of Swami Don’s Elegant Junk, light up with blue light and an image of things to come” (181). In this sense, the utopian move at the conclusion of the narrative is post-liberal and explicitly anti-pragmatic: there is no social terrain in which trauma might be recuperated as justice, no social grid against which gains and losses might be measured, no lifeworld that might productively use tragedy. Bobo’s body resists reabsorption in the body politic. Insofar as a utopian “medium” exists, we should have to locate it in a post-territorial moral

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subjectivity severed from the social domain. Here Nordan departs from the Latin American magic realists, for whom magic emerges from and can be reabsorbed by what Weinstein calls the “subject-space-time loom” of culture, a capacity Weinstein attributes to “folk-culture’s capacious vision of collective human beings.”38 Given the degraded state of culture in Arrow Catcher, moral agency can only press, at it were, toward some alternative universe lest it be recoded within the abject territoriality of the hyperreal. In the narrative’s final vision, then, we see Sally Anne and Alice not seeing Bobo face to face but instead (and even this part is speculative, since “no one knows for sure”) through a crystal ball darkly. If, in Fuentes’s Faulkner, only what is inherited is legible, in Nordan, only that which is not inherited—that which is radically original—is exempt from the regime of the hyperlegible. But if trauma proves irreducible to a culture that cannot absorb or productively use it, it is equally destructive of the cultural loom. If Bobo’s body can’t reenter Arrow Catcher, there’s no going back for anyone else either. This is why the confrontation with Bobo is always figured as the realization of isolation—a realization that, in turn, becomes the staging ground for moral revision and rearrangement. As Žižek observes apropos of the symbolic order that structures reality for us, “alienation in the big Other is followed by separation from the big Other.”39 After he leaves the scene of Bobo’s wolf whistle at Red’s, “something ended” for Runt Conroy, and he “suddenly knew . . . that he was all alone in the world, that we all are” (42). And so with Coach Heard, for whom the “little colored boy’s death” means the recognition of “this emptiness inside me.” In the penultimate chapter of the novel, Runt and Coach Heard attempt to make use of their insight, but their success is limited, susceptible to repetition (Coach Heard can’t stop calling Runt “Runt,” despite his desire to be called Cyrus) and marked by resignation. Confronted with an evil world, Coach Heard grimly pronounces that “we’ll just have to make do” (276). For Runt—er, Cyrus—and Coach Heard, there’s no magic. For the women at Swami Don’s Elegant Junk, the prospects are different: less encumbered by social norms, they are more attuned to magical rearrangements. Sally Anne, whose initial reaction to Bobo’s social violation is the protective gesture of driving him home, actively searches out Swami Don’s, noting that, as the wife of a murderer, she is liberated from aristocratic dictates that declare Swami Don’s “tacky” (286). Alice, however, is the novel’s true visionary. Indeed, early in the narrative, her vision is expansive: She saw what was unimaginable, classrooms in the swamp with black faces and white faces together, singing, “Jump down, turn around, pick a bale of

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cotton.” She saw children holding hands with grown-ups, black and white, singing “We Shall Overcome” in long lines and in churches. She saw a church bombed in Montgomery, dead children, marchers in Selma, freedom riders in Jackson. She saw bombs flying over the miraculous desert, Baghdad burning, Emmett Till dead, Medgar Evers dead, Martin King . . . (17) The occasion for her vision is her class’s field trip to the house of the horribly burned Glenn Gregg. In typical fashion, Alice has envisioned for her students a happy scenario, an effort facilitated by euphemism, cliché, and get well cards, one of which shows a burning Glenn Gregg with the caption, “I’m fine . . . but boy this fire is hot!” (4). Upon arrival, however, the class is captivated by the story of Glenn’s mother, a former stutterer. Detailing the “progressive tyranny” of her husband and her descent into the “dead language” of cliché—a language that descends into pure nonsense and domestic violence when the clichés began to overlap (“Don’t cross your bridges before they hatch” [15])—Mrs. Gregg recovers language by “thinking of the tune ‘Here Comes Santa Claus’ ”: “With that tune in her head, she could say anything. Santa Claus had broken her chains and set her free” (17). The liberating power of Santa Claus is followed immediately in the narrative by Alice’s own vision, itself initiated with an image of Christian incarnation: “Alice was born again. She saw the ancient star rise over Bethlehem. She saw shepherds abiding, flocks and myrrh and miracles in the dunes” (17). Confronting the abject body of Glenn Gregg, where death literally infects life (“His teeth were white and prominent as a skeleton’s” [18]), Alice realizes before anyone else “that we are, all of us, alone” (18). Deprived early on of the community’s repressive praxis—its strategies of regulating horror—Alice is acutely sensitized to racial trauma: hence her vision of Bobo’s corpse in the magical raindrop. But Alice’s inability to intervene in this scenario suggests a limitation to her visionary capacity. I locate this limitation in Alice’s language, which strives to recode trauma in a decidedly pedestrian idiom. Rather than embodying magic, Alice’s “dead language” merely articulates the real in the banal dialect of pedagogy. Following the trial, Alice instructs her students to “draw pictures, each of them, of the murder trial, what they remembered most of this horrible travesty of justice, this momentous injustice of setting child-murderers free, this racial and human insult to each of them—so Alice said, in her customary way of speaking her outrage” (257). But against Alice’s threadbare phrasing, the children recognize the true magic, and so each of them draws “a picture of a parrot” (258). At Swami Don’s, Alice is more circumspect, and it is only when she and Sally Anne speak, “finally, from their hearts” (emphasis added) that the crystal ball “maybe” shines with bright blue light.

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Finally, however, we must recognize in this concluding image an insistence on the existential imperative of moral imagination severed from social practice. Here we can draw a sharp contrast with Faulknerian utopianism, which characteristically envisions southern folkways as the precondition of racial redemption. For Ike McCaslin in Go Down, Moses, the eschaton of race must proceed from a land where “wives and daughters at least made soups and jellies” for sick slaves, not from the land of “pulpiteers earning Chautauqua fees, to whom the outrage and injustice were as much abstractions as Tariff or Silver or Immortality” (284). For Gavin Stevens in Intruder in the Dust, the racial “injustice is ours, the South’s. We must expiate and abolish it ourselves, alone and without help nor even (with thanks) advice”—least of all advice from “outlanders who would fling [Sambo] decades back . . . by forcing on us laws based on the idea that man’s injustice to man can be abolished overnight by police.”40 In Wolf Whistle, it’s not that the outsiders have any advice to give, but that the insiders have no cultural resources upon which to draw. But against the traumatically deadlocked and racially determined terrain of Arrow Catcher, the narrative brings to bear an excessive and idiosyncratic magic. For Nordan, “eternal transformations of the spirit” occur irrespective of normal causality through a kind of utopian bricolage: the commercialized Christmas of “Here Comes Santa Claus” can somehow prompt a vision of the Nativity and Martin King, and the commodified magic of Swami Don, who “buys his Tarot cards by the pound” (285) and ought to be listed in “a guide for tourists” (283), can magically facilitate a hopeful image of “things to come.” Ultimately, what Wolf Whistle conjures is a moral imagination that might open alternative spaces and scenarios in the aftermath of a decoded terrain of racial trauma. That the narrative formally registers, in its utopian resolution, what Georg Lukács labels the novel’s special dissonance—the “refusal of the immanence of being to enter into empirical life”—thus emerges less as a quietist gesture than as an attempt to restore to Emmett Till’s murder its traumatic resonance and capacity to alter cultural terrains. In this sense, Wolf Whistle extends the cultural work of the early reporters of the event by preventing Till’s murder from receding into the museum of dead history. l At the conclusion of “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Melville’s narrator uncovers Bartleby’s past in a dead letter office and posits an unlikely equivalence. “Dead letters,” he asks, “does it not sound like dead men? On errands of life, these letters speed to death.” The equivalence I propose—between dead history and dead bodies—is perhaps even more unlikely, although it may help to frame a broad ques-

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tion surrounding and explicitly engaged by Nordan’s novel: how can one make use of the dead? Actually, that is two questions, the first of which, inquiring of strategy and technique, we have considered already. It is the second, inquiring of propriety and efficacy, to which I want to turn now in an effort to reconnect the text with the broader question of simulation and civil rights. If Emerson’s assertion that history is the biography of a few great men haunts the representation of the civil rights struggle, too easily and too often told in precisely that way, it bears little on the case of Emmett Till. Lacking both greatness and manhood, his is a biography of a dead body, another genre that pervades the story of civil rights. I say genre, but the register of dead bodies—and more broadly, of traumatized bodies—is more often visual than literary. Images of African American bodies violated by the instruments of segregation and white supremacy—water, rope, dogs, fire, batons— were and are immediately powerful and morally legible, but Till’s case is different: his is irrepressibly a story involving detective work, endless speculation, and contested causal sequences. More importantly, it is a story in which he remains forever mute. Responding sharply to an academic essay that “reads” an apparent jailhouse suicide as a “literary act of incidental annihilation through intentional civil disobedience,” Patricia Yaeger poses the cogent questions surrounding Till’s case: “What happens when we ‘textualize’ bodies, when we write about other people’s deaths . . . as something one ‘reads’?” “What are the dangers inherent in figuring—or disfiguring—the spectre? How far should we go in invoking the ghost, how far in consuming its traumas? If circulating the suffering of others has become the meat and potatoes of our profession, if this circulation evokes a lost history but also runs the dangers of commodification, then how should we proceed?” Although Yaeger’s subject is “an academic world that is busy consuming trauma . . . through its stories about the dead,” her questions bear just as urgently on Nordan’s novel, which accumulates capital in the field of cultural production—Wolf Whistle is by far Nordan’s best-known and best-selling work—by recirculating as text and story the body of Emmett Till.41 For Randall Kenan, that is precisely the novel’s limitation: the “conspicuous absence” of “Bobo’s heart and soul” that leaves him “little more than an object.” “Never,” Kenan writes, “are we invited into the head of a child who becomes a scapegoat who becomes a martyr who becomes a loss.”42 In addressing Kenan’s criticism I want to take a roundabout path through a story Kenan published a year before Wolf Whistle in order to return to the question of how bodies work in the story of civil rights. Although “Let the Dead Bury Their Dead,” the title story of Kenan’s 1992 collection, does not directly concern the civil rights movement, its close attention to a moment of rearranged interracial relations con-

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nects it to Nordan’s novel. In his own swamp of the real in the environs of Tims Creek, North Carolina, Kenan tells the story of Pharaoh, a slave born in Africa who murders his master and overseers, founds a maroon community of runaway slaves, and continues to haunt the surrounding plantations. Like Bobo, he refuses to stay buried either in the ground or in history. In one version of the story, Pharaoh returns from the dead to ravage the black community of Tearshirt, which has regressed, following emancipation, from his egalitarian, animistic religion to a diabolical form of Christianity under the sinister leadership of his successor, Preacher. Where Pharaoh “hadn’t been too big on the white man’s God, they say, told the people to love themselves and all things would follow,” Preacher proclaims “everlasting damnation” on a “bunch of Negroes living way out in the backwoods like animals wallowing in they heathen ways.” Pharaoh’s destruction of Tearshirt comes with a moral: “What began as good has ended in evil. We are not ready.”43 Resonant as it is, the moral comes embedded in a narrative apparatus that locks folk history into the prison house of empiricism. Ostensibly told by Ezekiel Cross in 1985 and recorded by the Revered James Malachi Green, the oral history of Pharaoh’s exploits is embedded in an elaborate mock-scholarly apparatus consisting of an oppressive array of footnotes, many of which reference actual historical sources, including Herbert Aptheker’s work on slave revolts used as evidence that antebellum maroon societies existed in the “swampy regions” of southeast North Carolina. Whatever the evidentiary value of such sources, Kenan’s narrative privileges reality in a different key. An epigraph from Zora Neale Hurston— “Now you are going to hear lies above suspicion”—gives away the joke, as does a long quotation preceding from Bakhtin’s Dialogic Imagination. “The fantastic in folklore is a realistic fantastic,” Bakhtin writes. “Such a fantastic relies on the real-life possibilities of human development—possibilities not in the sense of a program for immediate action, but in the sense of the needs and possibilities of men, those eternal demands will remain forever, as long as there are men; they will not be suppressed, they are real, as real as human nature itself, and therefore sooner or later they will force their way to a full realization.”44 It is precisely such possibilities that are foreclosed by the regime of the footnote, for which there is only one kind of real. Kenan’s critique of Wolf Whistle is, in turn, underwritten by the possibilities and foreclosures modeled by own his story of a dead body that won’t stay buried. Laudatory toward the dangerous “tenor” of Nordan’s stylistic improvisations, Kenan also “sigh[s] in regret, imagining what profundity might have been attained had the author attempted to imagine what apparently is still the unimaginable to too many Americans.”45 Whereas Kenan crosses the color line to imagine the meaning of Pharaoh for the white community—both as threat to the plantation regime and so-

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lace to the gay botanist Phineas Cross, who encounters Pharaoh during an errand into the wilderness—Nordan remains, especially in the latter part of Wolf Whistle, solidly on the color line’s white side. For Kenan, this means a fantastic that’s not realistic enough, that suppresses possibilities that might be unlocked from a more dialogic interrogation of a figure who becomes, in the end, a mere cipher, a “loss” in more senses than one. Caught between the double bind of a limited vision on the one hand and a too-authoritative ventriloquism on the other, Nordan opts toward the “peripheral” view of Till’s story—its “white trash version,” as he puts it.46 Arguably, that is where the hard interpretative work properly belongs. For African Americans in 1955 and today, Emmett Till’s body hardly occasions hermeneutics: its meaning is all too clear. At the same time, Nordan’s choice reflects the prismatic pressures exerted on Till’s story and the broader narrative of civil rights, itself caught between the centripetal forces of identitarian fracture and the centrifugal forces of electronic winnowing wherein only some stories and images survive. That Emmett Till’s story and image are among them is clear. What is not is whether his body today speaks with one voice or many. Is a collective meaning of Emmett Till possible or desirable? Or does the persistence of social division inevitably generate different tropes for different folks? Reading Marx on the uses of the dead, Yaeger ponders the possibility that “the dead—not as the facts but as the ‘figures’ of history— feed revolutions,” their “spectrality” offering the “metaphoric foundations of the new” and providing “the tropes we push off from, or push away from, in order to suggest other, more utopian orders.”47 Wolf Whistle figures the body of Emmett Till in precisely such an effort; indeed, it is difficult to imagine a more elaborate attempt to trope a dead body in order to open utopian paths. The question is whether tropes as extravagant as Nordan’s offer such leverage, and if so, on what terms. Although Nordan strives to protect Bobo’s corpse from banal documentation and easy dénouement, there is also a micro-utopian logic at work in a narrative that uncomfortably skirts, at times, what Jeff Abernathy calls the hell-andback syndrome, a plot of white “moral growth” that haunts the American narrative of confronting the racial Other. But where Abernathy suggests that racial “otherness attracts . . . white protagonists precisely because their journey there is not permanent,” Wolf Whistle ensures that confronting Emmett Till is no vacation.48 There at the very end, both haunting and hopeful, Bobo’s image speaks hopefully of what was and what is to come.

chap ter 5 mass south / mapped south The Ambiguous Terrains of Bobbie Ann Mason and James Wilcox

Magical swamps are not the only topographical feature shared by Randall Kenan and Lewis Nordan. On firmer ground in Tims Creek, North Carolina, and Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, respectively, Kenan and Nordan return across multiple works to rewrite a single (and singular) literary terrain. They were not, of course, the first to establish themselves as the owners and sole proprietors of literary postage stamps of soil. Nor are they alone in the landscape of contemporary southern writers, surveying which one finds as well Ernest Gaines and Bayonne Parish, Louisiana; George Singleton and Forty-Five, South Carolina; Clyde Edgerton and Hansen County, North Carolina; and Jan Karon and Mitford. Although defining a post-Yoknapatawpha syndrome with any precision is a fraught matter— many authors, after all, return to a similar terrain in ways quite different from Faulkner’s—I want nevertheless to suggest that Faulkner started a trend. In briefly considering how contemporary southern writers have both borrowed and altered Faulkner’s literary production of place, I want to begin by laying the groundwork for an analysis of the two writers who orient this chapter, Bobbie Ann Mason and James Wilcox. Although Faulkner’s metaphor of the postage stamp of soil references most obviously the rectangular boundaries of Yoknapatawpha County, the metaphor works on other levels as well, most obviously on the level of message sending. As the stamp facilitating Faulkner’s letter to the world, Yoknapatawpha is literally a stylized topography, a ligature between (and container of) style and soil. Putting his stamp on the South, Faulkner marks it as his own (textual) territory. Shrewdly posing the questions of what, precisely, “ ‘Yoknapatawpha Co.’ maps, what textual significance inspires its cartography, and what difference . . . . [it makes] conceptually and intellectually to associate Faulkner’s work with the delineation,” Joseph Urgo brings to bear anti-mimetic premises (rejecting that Yoknapatawpha is merely a “place superimposed on or extracted from” Lafayette County, “the actual place in northern Mississippi”) that bear, I suggest, even more urgently on contemporary postage stamps of southern soil, many of which approach the thematic purity of Tara more closely than Yoknapatawpha’s mimetic plausibility and historical density.1 Faulkner calls it soil, but it would more properly be called land: a cul-

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tural fiction of labor, production, and property. Faulkner is Yoknapatawpha’s sole owner, yet the land also owns him, determining and limiting, on some level, his options as proprietor. If, as Richard Godden powerfully argues in Fictions of Labor, Faulknerian stylistics “tak[e] shape as narrative options and stylistic habits that are, quite literally, forced out of a historically determined and pervasive structure of feeling”—a structure economically determined, according to Godden, by a shift from bound labor to wage labor—then I want to consider what it might mean for later writers to reproduce the Yoknapatawpha syndrome in response to a later economic shift—namely, from an economy organized by production and Fordist labor to one organized by consumption and flexible labor.2 In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre argues that “each society offers up its own peculiar space, as it were, as an ‘object’ for analysis and overall theoretical explication.” “I say each society,” Lefebvre continues, “but it would be more accurate to say each mode of production, along with its specific relations of production.”3 Although the shift I wish to trace toward space as an effect of “relations of consumption” will become clearer as we turn to the analysis of specific texts, the problem I want to consider presently is the relation between literary spaces and “actual” ones as it evolves over time. My suggestion, in short, is that the proliferation of codes accompanying deterritorialization correlates to an ascendance of design and style as determinative of place. Although I would want to qualify Godden’s relatively strict determinism— historically determined structures of feeling forced out, after all, only one set of Faulknerian “stylistic habits”—Godden demonstrates a particular moment of labor relations as shaping, at least in the final instance, its “fictions.” It is this linkage, I argue, that has deteriorated under a regime of late capitalism and its complementary practices of flexible labor, stylistic turnover, and niche marketing. In the same way that ostensibly vernacular architectures exist in the late South alongside a multiplicity of imported and innovative architectural styles, so, I suggest, literary stylings proliferate as they are increasingly detached from local histories and modes of production. Writing of Clyde Edgerton, James A. Grimshaw claims that “Thomas Hardy has his Wessex, William Faulkner has his Yoknapatawpha County, and Clyde Edgerton has his Hansen County, North Carolina.”4 The assessment is wrong, and not only because it implies literary equivalence. Rather, between Hardy and Faulkner on the one hand and Edgerton on the other, there is a difference between relatively determined terrains and a relatively free-floating one. If it seemed self-evident to Robert Penn Warren that “literary regionalism is . . . not even primarily a literary matter,” but rather “springs from some reality in experience,” the spring would seem to bounce both ways in today’s literary market, where one of

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the surest signs of the continued viability of southern literature lies in the marketing of the books themselves.5 Pick up a book by Clyde Edgerton and you will see what I mean. With some literary territories—Jan Karon’s, for instance, which I want to consider momentarily—the ascendance of place as an effect of style and not its cause is nearly absolute: Karon owns Mitford in a way that Faulkner never owned Yoknapatawpha. Surveying the phenomenon at the Edgerton/Karon end of the spectrum, one recalls Baudrillard’s reworking of Borges’s fable of the map. In Borges’s story, the Empire’s cartographers design a map that covers its territories exactly and entirely. But whereas for Borges the passage of time causes the map to fray and shred, Baudrillard reverses the fable to suggest that “today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map.”6 In the most apocalyptic reading, the proliferation of literary mappings might be seen as assisting the decay of the real South that used to lie underneath, although this is surely complicated by the capacity of themed space and imagined geographies to rebound back upon actual terrains and territorialities. Still, the designer postage stamps of the late South send a very different message than does the recent scholarly trend of remapping the South as a literary and cultural territory. If, as Robert Brinkmeyer shows in Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West, some southern writers put a fluid, transportable southern identity literally on the road heading west, a greater number, perhaps, keep it at home locked within insular geographies. Although Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn call for southern studies to look away from traditional boundaries toward other Souths—hemispheric, global, postcolonial— there remains no shortage of southern writers who look closer to home to microSouths that remain distinctive, exotic—even quaint. Bobbie Ann Mason and James Wilcox are not among them. Although both writers are associated with a distinctive locale—Mason with the small towns of western Kentucky, Wilcox with Tula Springs, Louisiana—neither comes close to the commission of nostalgia in its temporal sense. And yet, as I hope to show, traces of nostalgia in its original, spatial meaning of “homesickness” are evident throughout their work. The problem that I wish to address relative to both writers is simply this: how is space generated and consumed under a regime of deterritorialization and time-space compression—that is to say, outside of any recursive movement toward a home imaginable as coherent or integrated? For both Mason and Wilcox, a poetics of space is, inevitably, a dissonant poetics: space resists at every turn aesthetic strategies that might recuperate it as home. In contrast to the first three chapters of The Real South, wherein we have considered texts that recuperate or consolidate (albeit in radically different ways) a southern home(land), this chapter will initiate a movement in the other direction toward the analysis of narra-

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tives in which home proves unavailable, even as simulation. If Margaret Mitchell and Julie Dash insist that you can go home again, Barry Hannah and Josephine Humphreys suggest that you can’t. Whereas Horwitz and Naipaul view the South of strip malls and fast food as ripe for excavation, Mason and Wilcox look directly at that South; the former, after all, gave us K-Mart realism. At the level of economic praxis, the shift can be described as one from forms of consumption that are intimate, local, and highly differentiated to those, like K-Mart, that are characterized as mass or generic. This is not to say that the latter cannot compel “socio-emotioeconomic” investment, nor that the capacity to transform southern terrains into “my South” has dissipated entirely, but rather that contingency emerges with new force as a condition of traversing spaces experienced as increasingly disconnected and attenuated under the pressures exerted by modern economies and the culture industry. How, then, to map the mass South? For both Mason and Wilcox, the answer lies in the intersection of style and movement—more precisely, in stylistic correlations with the kinds of movement possible in their respective late southern terrains. Both writers practice what Godden has recently labeled a poetics of deregulation. As I hope to show, space emerges as a crucial site of deregulation—that is to say, deregulation maps onto space as deterritorialization in two discrete, although interrelated senses: first, as the loss of “owned” space that makes subsequent movement nomadic in nature, and second, as the loss of the codes by which earlier territorialities were maintained. In this post-genealogical world, authenticity is legible only as loss. “Nothing’s authentic anymore,” complains a character in Mason’s In Country, and both the context—Joan Rivers is substituting for Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show”—and the content of the statement pervade the work of both writers.7 The projects of stylistic mapping proceed, however, in radically different ways. In Shiloh and Other Stories, which I take as my primary critical object, social spaces—in Lefebvre’s sense of something “at once work and product—a materialization of ‘social being’ ”—are dematerialized, literally put “up in the air” by media frequencies that break down old territorialities and their inertial codes.8 Home wilts under the pressures of media culture, but in a profoundly ambivalent way, since, as Matthew Guinn suggests, the “figure of the author herself” is conspicuously absent from Mason’s “juxtapositions of urban and rural, commercial and local.”9 Emergent efforts to re-command or reconsolidate space typically dissolve in entropy. As we shall see, Mason’s distinctive stylistic intervention is to suppress the utopian or dystopian valences that typically accrue around such sequences—to capture, as it were, deterritorialization in its pure form, which is to say, at the inarticulate moment at which desire leaves home and begins looking for new modes

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of desiring-production. (Typically, it doesn’t have far to go, since the market stands forever poised to recuperate desiring-production as consumption.) In Wilcox, by contrast, social space is subjected more thoroughly to a regime of habituation and regularized practice. If Shiloh and Other Stories turns on the loss of home, Wilcox’s Tula Springs novels drive back toward artificial territorialities that are tenuously coded, heterogeneous, and anxiously themed. Driving, as we shall see, emerges as a central activity in the work of both writers, but while Mason’s drivers lack even a sense of destination, Wilcox’s move intentionally from one space to another in an effort to find a place where they belong. Unlike Mason’s families, which are literally de-familialized, Wilcox’s families are simply uncanny: they are never quite nuclear, except in the sense that they are fissile. (At any rate, they are not conventional.) What appears, then, in Mason as the loss of the real appears in Wilcox as an artificial real organized around themed spaces, built environments, and decoration—lightly coded territorialities that are continually worked and reworked, produced and reproduced, as characters maneuver between and among them. In Shiloh and Other Stories—a title that subtly decodes even Shiloh itself (as just another story)—there’s no there there, only an undifferentiated, blank terrain of residents and transients. Before turning to these writers, however, I want to visit another literary locale by way of contrast to the more complex spatio-narrative work of Mason and Wilcox. Jan Karon’s Mitford series, now comprising nine novels, entices readers to “Visit America’s favorite small town, one book at a time!” and has done so with marked success.10 Based on Blowing Rock, North Carolina, Mitford is regularly relocated to a kind of permanent exile on the New York Times bestseller list. Like the “Painter of Light,” Thomas Kincaid, and using a similar palette, Karon designs a palatable and desirable locality for an age ravaged by time-space compression. As a character in At Home in Mitford, the first novel in the series, observes, the town is “full of human-interest angles,” but in the final analysis, the angles aren’t very sharp.11 Karon smoothes them relentlessly, introducing pseudodramatic plots while tacitly assuring her reader that nothing really bad can ever really happen in Mitford—or more precisely, to Mitford. For Mitford is, at its core, a themed space, America’s favorite pre-narrated sim-town. Sequences and plots are absorbed continuously into its organic terrain through the organizing metaphor of cultivation: whatever the action, it will bear fruit eventually. Cultivation, as Raymond Williams reminds us in Keywords, was the original meaning of culture, and this etymological overlay helps to elucidate the relationship between the local culture of this small southern town and its central cultivator of nature and human nature, Father Tim Kavanaugh, gardener and priest.

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Even before his appearance, however, Karon introduces her readers to Mitford through a map that frames the narrative medium in which she works. Broadening its view slightly as the series progresses, the map assures us of the town’s stable ontology even as it situates us—as in Kincaid’s paintings, where we never gain access to the cozy cottages emanating light—in a somewhat precarious epistemological relation to it. In contrast to Faulkner’s map of Yoknapatawpha, which presupposes a placeless position from which the county is viewed, Mitford is represented pictorially, thus locating the subject in the same “world” as the town. Faulkner’s abstract grid acquires a qualitative dimension only through the accretion of narrative glosses (“Hightower’s House, where Joe Christmas ran to die”); Karon’s picture already possesses visual texture: value (in a painterly sense) precedes and predicts the narrative’s visually rich style. Framed by a decorative floral border, Mitford appears as seen from a bird’s-eye perspective just south of town. The grid of streets is visually dominated by trees, which assure us not only that there are trees in Mitford but that we are actually looking at Mitford and not at an abstract representation of it. But neither are we looking at a photograph, nor even a naturalistic drawing: in subtle ways, we’re only in the neighborhood of the neighborhood. Six inset pictures of local buildings—including “the Local,” where locals buy “produce from local sources” (17)—bring us closer to town, but in most cases they place our eyes at slightly above eye level. Visually, we never quite get our feet on the ground. In thus positioning her incipient reader, Karon affirms the stability of what Michel de Certeau calls the “instantaneous configuration of positions” while promising the touristic dimension of space (as “practiced place”) that “takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables.”12 Thus, as Karon’s map juxtaposes “objective” space with the social practices that will constitute it experientially, it promises a tour of Mitford while affirming its existence as garden, whether we tour it or not. As Karon writes in her “Acknowledgements,” her book is “about a small town that does more than exist in the imagination—it really is out there” (n.p.). The tension surrounding readerly access to Mitford reappears early in the novel, where “a travel feature by a prominent newspaper” describes the town as “delightfully out of step with contemporary America”: “Here, where streets are named for flowers . . . . spring finds most of the citizenry, including merchants, making gardens” (17). None of your mechanical supply-and-demand sorts in Mitford, where civic identity is expressed in an annual Festival of Roses. The article goes on to explain that “while Mitford’s turn-of-the-century charm and beauty attract visitors like bees to honeysuckle [there’s the organicism again], the town makes a conscious

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effort to discourage serious tourism” (17).13 As Father Tim comes to realize, the garden’s survival depends on boundary defense: World events continually reminded him of how blessed he was to live and work in the peace and tranquility of Mitford. It was only by the grace of God, some said, that their village was still largely unspoiled. A lot of the credit, of course, belonged to Esther Cunningham. The mayor was like a great, clucking hen, sitting on a nest which was the fragile ecology of their little town, and she was ready to defend it to the death. Still, development had sprung up around the edges, like weeds encroaching on a garden. Just beyond the big curve from Lew Boyd’s Esso was the bright yellow motel with a huge green cactus outlined in neon. There was growing pressure for a shopping center, and a food store chain was pawing the very ground where the town limit sign was erected. It was only a matter of time, was the general consensus at the Grill. “Over my dead body,” said Esther. (157) In the meantime, the mayor’s living body ensures the survival of the civic body she represents. While Esther Cunningham defends the garden’s “fragile ecology” from weedy encroachments, foxy developers, and pawing chains, Father Tim Kavanaugh cultivates it from the inside. He is the pastor of a (literally) pastoral town and text, where even cursing—in the “blasts,” “pedaddles,” and “dadgummits” that sprinkle his speech—is recuperated as nostalgia. Like shepherds Good and otherwise, he does his work on foot, eschewing the car even in “the day of the motorist . . . [when] anyone who walks is viewed with suspicion” (23). Disavowing any desire to “rise” to bishophood, Father Tim wants only horizontal movement: to “pastor a small congregation,” he says, “and to weave myself into the life of a parish in . . . in an intimate way [ellipsis in original]” (308). And so he does, enacting on his rounds the intimate rhythms of small-town life, dropping in at the Grill, the Local, the Oxford Antique Shop, the homes of his parishioners, the church, the rectory—even the jail, where the cells have “a hooked rug, and a table with an orderly stack of Southern Living magazines” (272).14 Karon synthesizes the rhythms of pastoral care and the liturgical calendar with seasonal rhythms and the exchanges—of recipes, flowers, food—that constitute the social economy of the town, relentlessly orchestrating, as Father Tim perceives of Mitford one morning, “a certain harmony of mood and feeling” (109). Even “the modern shopping experience” is absorbed within this harmony. Looking to purchase a jogging suit,

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Father Tim visits “The Collar Button,” which “was new, but . . . seemed old.” Replete with dark mahogany walls, fireplace, and lounging golden retriever, the store reminds Father Tim of “a study in some far reach of Cambridge, where he had once gone to research a paper on the life and works of C. S. Lewis.” Were the series not so concerned with the care of the self—a diabetic, Father Tim is forever watching his weight—the proprietor would doubtlessly be smoking a pipe. As it is, he merely offers Father Tim a dash of sherry, having sized up the pastor during his walks about town as a “proper candidate for the Collar Button style . . . English gentleman, country squire, village rector, the man of thoughtful reflection and quiet taste” (51). Although this style hardly squares with the turquoise jogging outfit Father Tim buys, the crucial point is that Father Tim buys into the Collar Button and the self-image it markets to him. Just so, I suggest, with Karon’s Mitford series. Like the themed space of The Collar Button, Mitford is slightly absurd but stylistically persuasive. Reading the series, one begins to see how “America’s favorite small town” emanates from the pen of a former advertising executive and probably a good one. If Gone with the Wind generates an erotics of culture, Karon generates (to use an inelegant parallelism) a comforts of culture, sublimating desire at every turn into more accessible and homey forms of consumption. Food and flowers prove as good as sex. In a sequence that enacts precisely the substitutions around which the series is organized, one of Father Tim’s parishioners sobbingly confesses that she has fallen in love with the mailman: “One evening we went to Wesley to a movie, and then we went to Holding for barbeque, and well . . . the first thing you know, I was . . . I was cooking for him [ellipses in original]” (86). The mailman, she explains, “is such good company” (86). This patterns repeats itself in the relationship between Father Tim and his beguiling neighbor, Cynthia, whom he eventually marries and with whom he adopts a “mountain boy” named Dooley Barlow. The family accumulates in the absence of sexual desire or production. The first bed he shares with Cynthia is “king size,” but it contains flowers, not passionate embraces. For a “romantic dinner by candlelight,” they substitute a picnic lunch, which Cynthia ecstatically “vote[s] the best picnic lunch of my life! . . . The best cold chicken, the best French bread, the best cheese, the best raspberry tart!” (439). She dislikes artificial flowers but finds pears “ravishing” (307, 308). Rerouting desire to the comforts of home, company, flowers, and food, At Home in Mitford promises a kind of homey accessibility, and yet, in the final analysis, it is no more accessible than Tara. Like Tara, Mitford acts as a kind of objet a, forever bending desire by creating, as Krips puts it, “the false impression that there was something . . . for which it acts as a substitute.” More precisely, Mitford simulates a total aestheticization of sociality by mapping a territory

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where, in the words of Georg Lukács, “right and custom are identical with morality,” where “no more of the soul has to be put into the man-made structures to make them serve as man’s proper sphere of action than can be released, by action, from those structures.”15 As readers, we too can exchange recipes, flowers, and the like, but never within a domain wherein social energy is not lost. As we tour Mitford and the “simple familiarity of friends in this small place on the map” (442), we recognize how unfamiliar a place it truly is, which is quite likely why so many of us are touring it in the first place. l In stark contrast to Karon’s stylized locality, the spaces of Bobbie Ann Mason’s Shiloh and Other Stories are stylistically deterritorialized from the beginning. There are no tourists, only drivers, like Leroy Moffitt of the title story, who don’t quite recognize their surroundings. Having “come home to stay” after an accident that has left him unable to drive his tractor-trailer, Leroy finds that home won’t stay put. Cruising the new subdivisions in a car that feels “small and inconsequential,” he recognizes that things have changed: “Now that he has come home to stay, he notices how much the town has changed. Subdivisions are spreading across western Kentucky like an oil slick. The sign at the edge of town says ‘Pop: 11,500’—only seven hundred more than it said twenty years before. Leroy can’t figure out who is living in all the new houses. The farmers who used to gather around the courthouse square on Saturday afternoons to play checkers and spit tobacco juice have gone. It has been years since Leroy has thought about the farmers, and they have disappeared without his noticing.”16 It’s not only that the visual tropes of an agrarian South—farmer, courthouse, tobacco—have disappeared, but that they have done so without notice: Leroy cannot account for visual difference. In this respect, he stands as symptomatic of the reality inhabited by characters who, throughout Shiloh and Other Stories, confront a cultural terrain that is at once perceptible and inscrutable. Although Mason’s style is, in some respects, as visually attentive as Karon’s, her images tend to be, like the subdivisions figured as an oil slick, thin and slippery. Putting images together proves no easier; sequences are just as hard to grasp. With every sentence, Mason registers the decay of integrated vision, the deterioration of narrative capacity. Less clear are the values that accumulate around the shift organizing Shiloh and Other Stories. The critical moment to which the collection returns time and again mediates, on the one hand, the human use of codes (that is, individuals defining themselves stylistically through the appropriation of certain codes available from a

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wider set), and on the other, the constitution of “the human” by codes. If the priority of subject to code renders the former (as contained in a “character,” a discrete person) intelligible as a user or, even more hopefully, as an authentic subject whose consumption enables the expression or fashioning of identity, the priority of the latter condemns the subject to what Baudrillard calls the “end of interiority”— the evacuation of the private spheres of selfhood as they are flattened against hyperreal surfaces, electronic interfaces, and consumer fetishes.17 For Mason, this crisis manifests itself as a problem of agency, reworking in a curious way the old problem of determinism against the backdrop of contemporary mass culture, with the Calvinist God replaced by Phil Donahue, the Deist design supplanted by a cacophony of white noise. The crux of Shiloh and Other Stories is, then, whether consumption enacts the mechanical reproduction of identity. Although the inevitability of the trend—and certainly few writer have ever exposed so clearly the banality of innovation—would seem to argue for such a reading, Mason’s consumers are rarely shown as being conditioned to accept a position within a particular social formation. On the contrary, consumption typically appears as liberatory and nomadic—that is to say, it marks a break from social scripts and spaces regarded as disciplinary and traditional. As one character explains to her mother, “people don’t have to do what they don’t want to as much now as they used to” (88), a freedom practiced in this case by leaving the kids at home for nights on the town, but also—and this speaks to the paradox at the heart of Mason’s work—by “going back to old-timey stuff” (87). Vaguely reminiscent of Scarlett O’Hara’s return to the “old ways” after refusing their disciplinary praxis, the return to the “oldtimey” lacks altogether the valences of Mitchell’s cultural erotics. Neither erotic (in ways we will consider momentarily) nor culturally specific, the old-timey fails to orient itself around distinctively southern topoi, leading Fred Hobson to classify Mason as “not a New South so much as a No South writer.”18 The diagnosis seems, on one level, inescapable, although as Guinn observes, Mason’s fiction puts “the local strip-mall . . . in a kind of cultural chiaroscuro with the cornfields behind it,” thus creating, but without ever fulfilling, the expectation of a “late Agrarian fiction in which waning farm communities are contrasted with the emptiness of an ascendant commercial culture.”19 Considered as a fiction of the late South, Shiloh and Other Stories would seem to understand “late” as a terminal condition. At first glance and perhaps at second as well, the emergent cultural industry seems equally deadening. Impervious to recuperation as neo-Adornian critique, Mason’s stories never establish critical traction against the culture industry because their stylistics run parallel to the mode of cultural production operative in the world of the text. This is especially true where repetition and innovation are con-

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cerned, since the most characteristic feature of Mason’s poetics is the elimination or collapse of the idea of alterity itself. At the levels of plot, character, and sentence, Mason’s poetics strive toward the suppression of difference. Although I want to return to the analytical possibilities lurking in this style, for the present let us consider three representative passages that collapse innovation and repetition: Edwin gasps like a swimmer surfacing. It is very cold on the beach. Another duck skis onto the surface. (224) But she expects to be baptized in a vat of chemicals, burning her skin and sizzling her hair. Ruby recalls an old comedy sketch, in which one of the Smothers Brothers fell into a vat of chocolate. (246) She wouldn’t be surprised if Joe tried the same trick again, this time carrying Holly off to Arizona. She has heard of divorced parents who kidnap their own children. (171) Each passage deflates a new and (more or less) threatening psychological state— occasioned by a marriage proposal, the expectation of chemotherapy, and a hypothetical child abduction, respectively—by situating it within an increasingly inertial sequence. Because such sequences are usually performed via focalization (as in the first passage) or psychonarration (as in the latter two), the elliptical psychological action renders opaque the internal logic of the sequence. We don’t know, in short, why Edwin notices the temperature or the ducks, nor why Ruby recalls the Smothers Brothers sketch, except to observe a loosely associative logic at work. Of the effect of the sequence, however, we can be more specific in noting the passive, almost narcotized quality of the cognitive state displacing the initial psychological rupture. In the first passage, this transition is accomplished through the register of the empirical world, creating a retroactive parallelism in which the new is tonally absorbed by quotidian detail: nature itself provides the inertial medium through which “surfacing” (the metaphor by which Edwin’s psychological shock is registered) is empirically neutralized by ducks breaking their surface. A similar sequence occurs in the second passage, where the traumatic scenario of the first sentence is effectively anesthetized by the second, where the term of equivalence (falling into a vat) substitutes, as it were, chocolate for chemical. In the third, a particularized scenario (Holly being carried off) becomes generalized, as if the very repetitiousness of parental abduction places “surprise” well beyond the experiential repertoire of this mother. What is crucial in this sequence, broadly conceived, is that it

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describes a world of givens that stands ready to absorb any psychological contingency. Shiloh and Other Stories represents states, not actions. This property sharply differentiates Mason’s minimalism from that practiced by Ernest Hemingway, an author with whom she is frequently compared. In the first passage above, the transition from Edwin’s state of shock to the register of concrete detail may appear to repeat the well-known scene from In Our Time in which Nick Adams attends to his campfire as a means of coping with the trauma he cannot confront directly. The internal logics of these two forms of minimalism are, however, quite different. Whereas, in Hemingway, minimalism operates according to a principle of synecdoche and psychological repression, Mason’s minimalism severs cause and effect. In contrast to Hemingway’s iceberg principle, in Mason there is no bottom seveneighths of the iceberg supporting the visible or legible eighth. Hemingway’s minimalism ultimately constitutes a means of recoding, of rebuilding schemes of value and exchange after the destruction of earlier ones; Mason’s registers a decoded reality resistant to emergent schemes of value. Put another way, value floats freely, detached from objects themselves and from any system of exchange that might corroborate or sustain social networks. Whereas Nick Adams’s trauma is still present as absent cause, Edwin’s shock has vanished because it was never quite possible. It is not that ducks have repressed shock in the same way that building a fire represses trauma, but that in a world of ducks, shock cannot happen. More generally, we might say that in Mason’s world there can be only effects, only sequential states that follow one another according to some inscrutable logic. Grammatically, this is signaled by the use of the present tense, which denies a temporal perspective from which sequence might be organized into causal pattern: every verb inscribes the presentism of Mason’s world, its compression of time perspective to an eternal present. To adapt T. S. Eliot on Henry James, Mason’s is a style so fine that no causality can penetrate it. So total is the absorption of innovation by repetition, agency by inertia, causality by mere sequence, that history itself gives way to the end of history. The end of history is a theme Mason seems compelled to repeat, most famously in the climax of In Country, where Emmett announces, “You can’t learn from the past.” “The main thing you learn from history,” he says, “is that you can’t learn from history.”20 But the end of history has itself to be historicized, and one of the paradoxes of Shiloh and Other Stories is that it is so explicitly tied to a particular historical moment, at times acquiring the distinct feel of a museum display, as when we are told that “word-processing machines” are “fancy typewriters that cost thousands of dollars and can remember what you type” (122). There are other para-

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doxes. The twentieth century that is “taking all the mysteries out of life” (232) is the same century in which “nobody knows anything” because the “answers are always changing.” Contingency exists uneasily alongside deterministic pattern; the latest trend acquires the distinct feel of fate. As we turn, then, to “Shiloh” as a place to begin mapping the historical terrain wherein the insides of history prove empty, I want to reiterate the capacity of Mason’s style to sustain paradox by deadening it. l At the conclusion of “Shiloh,” Leroy Moffitt summarizes the history of the battlefield from Grant to himself and realizes that he “is leaving out a lot”: “He is leaving out the insides of history. History was always just names and dates to him. It occurs to him that building a house out of logs is similarly empty—too simple. And the real inner workings of a marriage, like most of history, have escaped him” (16). Leroy’s blocked access to insides extends beyond history and a particular battlefield to encompass his home. Like most stories in the collection, “Shiloh” traces the dissolution of a home, and while divorce constitutes the mechanism in this particular case, other mechanisms—retirement, agoraphobia, relocation, a spouse on the run—do similar work. Homes are perpetually in transition; they don’t fit together like they used to. Similarly, “Shiloh” introduces a recurring typological division between (to borrow the title of a later story) “Residents and Transients”: there are those like Leroy who want to inhabit homes, and those like Norma Jean who want to evacuate them. Beginning with Leroy’s expressed desire to make his wife a “real home” (7), I want consider how the story depicts the real home as always, already vacated, subjected to a terminal fate aligned, through a complex set of associations, with the deadness of history itself. Symptomatically, Leroy associates reality with agency and authority. In the passage above, he posits, within the sequence history-house-marriage, expertise as the solution to the crisis in which he finds himself. The real house is one that he knows how to put together; a real marriage is one that he knows how to “work.” But beginning with Leroy’s newfound appreciation of “how things are put together” (2), “Shiloh” traces the steady deterioration of even the fantasy that mastering inner workings will secure the prerogatives of home. Anxious upon learning the etymology of his name—“Am I still King around here?” he asks his wife—Leroy ultimately recognizes that he’s only a pretender, just as he later confronts the reality that he’s merely toying with histories and houses. Registered as an ability to penetrate surfaces, the deficit here, I suggest, is not so much a character flaw—that is to say, an inattentiveness to insides—as a condition of a world composed of impene-

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trable surfaces. Toys themselves confirm the diagnosis. The “emptiness” of building a house out of logs references Leroy’s discarded model of a “real home,” itself modeled by a earlier log cabin made from “notched popsicle sticks” (1) that initiates Leroy’s quest for expertise after many years “when he never took time to examine anything” (2). From popsicle sticks, he advances to Lincoln Logs, but the idea of an actual “truckload of notched, numbered logs scares him” (11). For Leroy, the problem is not only that he prefers toys to the real thing, but that his toys hardly function as toys. As Susan Stewart explains in her consideration of “narratives of the miniature,” “the toy is the physical embodiment of the fiction: it is a device for fantasy, a point of beginning for narrative,” which in turn “opens an interior world” that the abstract spaces of social play do not.21 For Leroy, however, the interior world of fantasy is as empty as the interior of his popsicle log cabin. Unlike Tara, which acts as a kind of gigantic cultural toy in opening all manner of fantasies, Leroy’s toy cabin is fantastically dead. Though we might expect the log cabin in its various material incarnations to initiate dreams of frontier selfreliance and simpler times, such dreams never materialize. At best, it sustains a second-order fantasy that a “real marriage” with Norma Jean (whatever that might be) might somehow be possible. But even as Leroy longs for fantasy itself, he is easily distracted. Imagining for a moment that he and Norma Jean “could become reacquainted,” he “forgets why he wants to do this” when an oven timer interrupts his proto-reverie. Thwarted by the kits that condemn his string art, macramé, snap-together B-17 Flying Fortress, and Star Trek pillow covers (which “all the big football players on TV” are making [6]) to a regime of mechanical reproduction, he can’t even find a good fetish. In Slavoj Žižek’s terms, he doesn’t enjoy his symptom. Nor does anyone else. The banishment of pleasure from Mason’s narrative world is nearly absolute. Even those like Norma Jean who stand to benefit from deterritorialization and the decay of traditional social codes hardly experience transition as utopian. As the couple sit at their kitchen table—he toying with his Lincoln Logs, she outlining a composition for a class at Paducah Community College— Leroy experiences a rare moment of insight: “She sits at the kitchen table, concentrating on her outlines, while Leroy plays with his log house plans, practicing with a set of Lincoln Logs. . . . As he and Norma Jean work together at the kitchen table, Leroy has the hopeful thought that they are sharing something, but he knows he is a fool to think this. Norma Jean is miles away. He knows he is going to lose her. Like Mabel, he is just waiting for time to pass” (11). Norma Jean desires to leave the marriage for precisely the reason that Leroy wishes to remain in it: she wants

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to obtain agency in an imaginary space that is, first and foremost, different from the one she’s in. Like Leroy, she inhabits dead space; her way out, however, is not to fabricate a “real home”—a prefabricated one, as it turns out—but simply to leave the house she currently inhabits. Whereas Leroy imagines that expertise—that is, the project of figuring out how marriage and his wife work—will set things right, she resists his inspection. Above all, she wants Leroy to “stop staring at me” (13), to “leave me alone” (15). But autonomy imagined in these terms recurs no less inevitably to passive forms of consumption: of the cereal commodity (Body Buddies) consumed to aid her body-building, the education commodity that requires her to outline compositions on subjects such as “Why Music Is Important to Me,” even though she “doesn’t play the organ anymore” (11). When she did, The Sixties Songbook and an organ with “brightly colored buttons” allowed her to put her “own” Latino accent on “Sunshine Superman” (9), but her virtual liberation is more confusing than satisfying. “I didn’t like these old songs back then,” she says. “But I have this crazy feeling I missed something” (3).22 Whereas Leroy is “waiting for the time to pass” by playing with kits as “diversions, something to kill time” (2), Norma Jean outlines compositions because “it’s something to do” (11). They’re both killing time, only in different directions. In suggesting, then, the symmetry of Norma Jean’s outlines and Leroy’s plans, and in observing that Norma Jean doesn’t enjoy her symptom either, I do not mean simply to invert the critical consensus regarding what G. O. Morphew calls Mason’s “downhome feminism.”23 Rather, I wish to initiate a broader inquiry into how feminism, understood as a progressive politics of liberation, exists in tension with the inertial forces of Mason’s posthistorical culture. That Norma Jean is liberated from traditional codes is clear enough. The critical shift in the story, as she observes, is when her mother catches her smoking and won’t leave her alone. A United Daughters of the Confederacy member who retains a concept of Shiloh as sacred space, Mabel would wield enormous authority in the world, say, of Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, but in Mason’s world her authority has eroded altogether: her daughter can easily detach herself from regulated territory. But once detached, she has nowhere to go, no imagined geographies even to sustain productive movement. Shiloh and Other Stories is irreducible to Deleuzian poetics precisely because its nomadism is so pleasureless, its proto-schizoid energies so thoroughly sedated into a stupor. Temporally, it is a collection stuck in the nightmare of history’s absence: the total lack of what Jameson calls the “lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way.”24 With the “traditional value of cultural heritage” liquidated, to use Benjamin’s language, everything becomes frozen, locked within representa-

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tional forms impervious to everyday use.25 In turning, then, to three psycho-social fields oriented around trauma, desire, and authority, I want to attend carefully to how mass culture generates and sustains the recession of the real. l In “Shiloh,” the death of a child is displaced, in Leroy’s mind, by memories of Dr. Strangelove (5), just as he can only imagine the carnage of the Shiloh battlefield as “a board game with plastic soldiers” (15). The sequence is paradigmatic: trauma, which in classic psychoanalysis operates as a determinant of discrete selves, is instead projected into and diffused within symbolic networks wherein the self is dispersed. What was before an interior matter guaranteeing a particular mode of modernist subjectivity becomes instead exteriorized, flattened, screened. Nor does trauma aggregate and orient collective identities, serving as a location of culture in ways we have considered in earlier texts, notably Confederates in the Attic and Daughters of the Dust. At the conclusion of “The Ocean,” Bill Crittendon recalls his service on a navy destroyer: “He had seen a kamikaze dive into a destroyer. The explosion was like a silent movie that played in his head endlessly, like reruns of McHale’s Navy” (164). In “Old Things,” Cleo “cannot believe” that her daughter has been mistreated by her husband: “It is just as though she has been told some wild tale about outer space, like something on a TV show” (80). In a moment that looks forward to Baudrillard’s analysis of the first Gulf War, a character in “A New-Wave Format” recalls watching the Vietnam War on television: “It was like a drama series. . . . He feels terrible . . . remembering the war as a TV series” (222). The cumulative effect of this pattern is to suggest the virtualization of psychological action or its displacement to a domain beyond the control or ownership of the individual. This is one reason, I suggest, that the fetish can never quite work in Mason’s world: selves lack the coherence to sustain cathexis in objects that already circulate within highly mediated and dispersed symbolic networks. The interactions constituting this virtual, mass psychology do not, however, protect the individual from trauma, but rather diffuse it as a kind of collectivized, standardized anxiety. Recycled, in turn, by the media, this anxiety compels its consumers as a surrogate psychology. In “Old Things,” for example, Cleo “has put a chain on the door, because young people are going wild, breaking in on defenseless older women” (80), a scenario she has surely borrowed from the 10 O’Clock Report she watches regularly. Similarly, in “The Retreat,” Georgeann watches an episode of “Donahue”: “Donahue is interviewing parents of murdered children; the parents have organized to support each other in their grief. There is an organization for everything, Georgeann realizes” (142).

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Even grief is standardized and bureaucratized. In creating a virtual landscape of dread, television acts as an opiate of the masses, dulling and aggregating its individual anxieties in a repetitive cycle of mass addiction. In what amounts to an adumbration of the cultural practice operative in Shiloh and Other Stories, Baudrillard has written, “When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a plethora of myths of origin and signs of reality—a plethora of truth, of secondary objectivity, and authenticity. Escalation of the true, of lived experience, resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. Panic-stricken production of the real and the referential.”26 We have already observed the unrealized nostalgic potential of Leroy Moffitt’s log cabin model, to which we could add numerous examples such as the restaurant in “Residents and Transients,” which resurrects the figurative in its “framed arrangement of farm tools against red felt” and its scythes “mounted on wood like fish trophies” (129). Juxtaposed against this simulated agrarianism is the mechanical reproduction of food: you “choose your food from pictures on a wall, then wait at a numbered table for the food to appear” (129). Of secondhand truth, I will have more to say momentarily. For the present, I wish to focus on how the breakdown of territorialized desire regulated within the home fails to generate utopian momentum or productive nomadism. In the world of Real People (the TV show, not the real thing) and That’s Incredible—a world in which the quotidian and the extraordinary are subjected to the same logic of virtual production and consumption—desire itself gravitates toward an entropic, inertial state. In “Shiloh,” nostalgia underwrites both leaving home and staying there, thereby aligning The Sixties Songbook and the model log cabin. Although nostalgia may appear to offer a collective practice—as Linda explains to Cleo in “Old Things”: “Everybody’s going back to old-timey stuff” (87)—Mason consistently codes it as a form of atomized desire producing multiple and exclusionary investments in different “old times,” different “stuff.” In contradistinction to Leroy’s desire, for example, Mabel rejects the log cabin because she was raised in one: “It’s no picnic,” she tells Leroy. Instead, she routes her nostalgia toward Shiloh battlefield, of which both Leroy and Norma Jean are resistant consumers, although they do picnic there and purchase for her “a souvenir Confederate flag” (14). In “Old Things,” Cleo, like Mabel, tries to keep her daughter in a marriage and “doesn’t want to live in the past” (76). Resisting the emergent economy of the antique, she declares that “people are antique-crazy” (76). But even the antiques aren’t real, consisting mainly of objects like a newly “antiqued” trunk (76) or the “Early American whatnot” made of “imitation mahogany” (91). Although Cleo obtains from the whatnot what most characters fail to access in any form—a vision of domestic tranquility

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and order—it is sustainable only “for a moment” (93). Ultimately, nostalgia reiterates the erosion of agency, offering the past as just another inaccessible home. Other locations are, physically speaking, more accessible, but equally unavailable as inhabited space. Throughout Shiloh and Other Stories, Mason offers a muted variation on the scenario in Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, wherein inlanders, after “saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough,” head west: “Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges?” There, they realize that “they’ve been tricked”: “There wasn’t any ocean where most of them came from, but once you’ve seen one wave, you’ve seen them all.”27 For Mason, the land of sunshine and oranges is more often Florida, to which Bill and Imogene Crittendon travel, in “The Ocean,” to escape their landlocked landscape of deprivation. At home, Imogene had predicted that her husband “won’t set foot off this place for the rest of his born days” because “he’s growed to it” (149), but Bill’s mental “picture” of himself walking on the beach puts the couple on the road in a “big camper cruiser” (148). The picture, however, never materializes. Once on the road, Imogene gets “all sulled up,” she explains, “and it wouldn’t matter if we were here or in China or Kalamazoo” (160). Liquid assets prove vertiginous, as “all the big money” and “spending left and right” leave Bill “delirious” (149). The couple is deflated by Imogene’s idealized destination, Plains, Georgia, and equally disappointed by Florida, where Imogene examines the ocean and asks, “Is this what you brought me here to see? . . . It all looks the same” (164). In “Residents and Transients,” the narrator’s parents have retired to Florida, where they live in a mobile home and write letters home telling “all the prices of the foods [they] buy” (123). Other characters dream and move in a more westerly direction. In “Nancy Culpepper,” the title character’s father “has been sending away for literature on Arizona” (187). The husband in “Still Life with Watermelon” leaves home to become a “born-again cowboy” in Texas, a “compulsion” his wife “cannot understand” (62), although she continues to write him at a “tourist home in Amarillo” (64). He writes back from his imaginary West, where even the real is suspect: “Tom sent her a picture postcard of the Painted Desert, but Louise suspects the colors in that picture are too brilliant. No desert could look like that” (67). Tourism and its permanent twin, relocation, fail to sustain desire because space, like history, evaporates as a ground of agency. In Shiloh and Other Stories, it’s not only that you can’t go home again, but that you can’t go anywhere else either. The desire to leave home and the desire to stay there are equally regulated by mass culture, which provides a dialect for expressing even traditional social norms. In “Graveyard Day,” for example, Waldeen tells her suitor (the latest in a string

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of Joes), “I can’t get rid of my ex-husband just by signing a paper. Even if he is in Arizona and I never lay eyes on him” (172). She explains her inability by reference to Colonel Sanders and John Y. Brown, previous owners of Kentucky Fried Chicken who “can’t get rid of it” despite selling it (171). Similarly, Waldeen “hates the thought of a string of husbands, and the idea of a stepfather is like a substitute host on a talk show. It makes her think of Johnny Carson’s many substitute hosts” (173). The triangulated courtship is totally filtered through television: Waldeen’s daughter tries to please Joe “as though he were some TV game-show host who happened to live in the neighborhood” (167), while Joe announces his likelihood as a suitor by saying, “Nobody else can do Jimmy Durante imitations like I can” (172). Given her suspicion of stepfathers, Waldeen watches, predictably enough, The Waltons (169). Conversely, Linda in “Old Things” is leaving home, and she “ain’t never missed Charlie’s Angels” (79). When she does, her son takes a Polaroid picture of “the dark-haired” actress and later gives it to his (virtual) mother: “Here, Mama, that’s you” (90). She’s not fooled, registering her blocked access to the world of plenitude and celebrity. “Just give me her money and I’ll do without her looks” (90), she says, with the clear implication that she’ll get neither. Georgeann in “The Retreat” is another incipient transient, but her desire recurs to the video game Galaxians. As she plays, she “feels in control” (145) as the video screen delivers new and euphoric experiences of the self. “You forget everything but who you are,” she says. “Your mind leaves your body . . . I was happy when I was playing that game” (146). Anomalously pleasurable, the experience nevertheless flattens “control” to the exact depth of the video screen that stares down, like Body Buddies before it, the emancipation upon which it capitalizes. If “individuated” trauma and “personal” desire find themselves always, already recoded by mass culture, the latter’s effects are equally evident in the public domain as individuals attempt to command spatial environments. Because authority deriving from a stable, structured social sphere no longer operates, authority itself becomes free-floating. The consequent regime of expertise presses in two directions: first, toward making expertise ostensibly available to everyone, and second, by taking expertise away and placing it under the control of the “real” experts. The home is an especial object of this regime, as in “The Retreat,” where a Christian marriage expert uses dead math to describe “seven kinds of intimacy, and eleven women volunteer their opinions. Seven of the women present are ministers’ wives. . . . The women talk about marriage enhancement, a term that is used five times” (143). As an effect of this shift, agency can be simulated only through citation or resistance. In “Still Life with Watermelon,” Peggy is a citer: “Peggy reads Harlequin romances and watches TV simultaneously. She pays attention when the

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minister on The 700 Club gives advice on budgets. ‘People just aren’t smart about the way they use credit cards,’ she informs Louise. This is shop talk from her job in customer service at the K Mart” (62). Attending simultaneously and without any sense of alterity to the mass libertinism of the Harlequin romance and the mass puritanism of The 700 Club, Peggy offers a threadbare axiom whose ambiguous origin suggests its equal consonance in the fields of TV evangelism and mass retail. (To our earlier observation that Mason’s minimalism fails to signal psychological depth, we should add that its psychological surfaces metonymically implicate a broad cultural field.) But whatever its source, Peggy’s pronouncement constitutes an effort, dead on arrival, to establish a hierarchical relationship with her housemate Louise. This pattern is slightly altered in “The Rookers,” where Mack Scaggs, a pathological resident afraid to leave home, “likes to compare the predictions in the Old Farmer’s Almanac. He likes it when the Almanac is wrong. Anyone else would be rooting for the Almanac to be right” (18). Resisting the Almanac’s simulation of folk expertise in the tones of the expert, Mack “sounds like the President delivering a somber message on the economy” (23). But as with Leroy’s lecture on Shiloh, he’s faking it. Bill in “The Ocean” is similarly critical of the expert—here, Michael Landon waxing nostalgic on the nineteenth-century home, where “everybody lived mainly in one small room and . . . were forced to live together, to cooperate, to work together” (162). “Bet he lives in a mansion,” said Bill, who was pacing the floor. “How does he explain that?” Mike Landon said it didn’t depend on the number of rooms, as long as you can communicate. His kids don’t watch TV during the week, he said, except for Little House on the Prairie. (163) Landon doubly simulates the nineteenth-century home on TV and in “real life,” since the effects of close quarters can be reproduced, even in a mansion, by “communication.” The truly uncanny feature of the passage, however, is that Bill’s objection is countered by the celebrity expert thousands of miles away. Punching the electronic tar baby, Bill finds that his authority is already absorbed by the virtual expert whose pronouncements carry more weight than his own local effort to restore the home as a controlled space. With his home on wheels, Bill tries to play the expert with his wife, lecturing her on China and the deficiencies of “our peanut President” (152), but neither the domestic sphere nor the political one submits to his expertise. “Residents and Transients,” however, offers a salient revision of the motif, since

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here the authorities are themselves divided. The story’s title refers to cat populations who “stay put” and those who “are on the move” and “lack real homes” (128). Explaining the distinction to her lover over a game of Monopoly, Mary, the story’s narrator, continues: “Everybody always thought the ones who establish the territories are the most successful—like the capitalists who get ahold of Park Place. . . . The thing is—this is what the scientists are wondering about now—it may be that the transients are the superior ones after all, with the greatest curiosity and most intelligence. They can’t decide” (128–29). For Mary, the experts’ indecision resonates with her own: she must decide whether to reside at the family farm vacated by her parents or follow her husband to Louisville, where he is purchasing a new house. Resident or transient? The crucial difference in Mary’s citation of the experts is that it signals her capacity to dwell in possibility, a fairer house—if you will forgive the allusion—than Mason’s normative prose, to which her mind proves irreducible: alone among the protagonists of Shiloh and Other Stories, Mary tells her own story in the present tense. Similarly, she owns her own trauma, becoming “hysterical” when she sees an injured rabbit that is moving but going nowhere: “Its forelegs are frantically working, but its rear end has been smashed and it cannot get out of the road” (130). But it is her voice that proves most salient, since she registers dissonance in the prefabricated discourse of the experts, among them the investment counselor “who told us, without cracking a smile, ‘You want to select an investment posture that will maximize your potential’ ” (126). Mason’s normative narrator could never say “without cracking a smile” because the phrase brings leverage to bear on language. That Mary confuses the investment counselor with “a marriage counselor, some kind of weird sex therapist” (126) is significant, since her own matrimonial bonds have begun to loosen. Like the investment counselor, her husband Stephen, who sells word-processing machines for a living, word processes while “talking about flexibility and fluid assets” (126). “It occurs to me,” Mary relates, “that wordprocessing, all one word, is also a runny sound” (126). Later, Stephen lectures Mary about places to live: “Those attachments to place are so provincial,” he says. “People live all their lives in one place,” I argue frantically. “What’s wrong with that?” “You’ve got to be flexible,” he says breezily. “That kind of romantic emotion is just like flag-waving. It leads to nationalism, fascism—you name it; the very worst kind of instincts. Listen, Mary, you’ve got to be more open to the way things are.” Stephen is processing words. He makes me think of liquidity, in-

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vestment postures. I see him floppy as a Raggedy Andy, loose as a goose. (130–31) Without overreading this passage as a blanket critique of transients, it neatly encapsulates the pressures of liquidity that have loosened, throughout Shiloh and Other Stories, all systems of symbolic exchange from money to marriage. But even with her concrete relation to language, Mary’s course remains indeterminate; at the story’s close, she’s “waiting for the light”—refracted eerily as green and red in the eyes of her “odd-eyed cat”—“to change” (131). Despite her recognition of choice— that is, some understanding of structured movement—Mary, too, is finally maneuvered into a passive stance, a liquid posture. Writing in irony zero degree, Mason suppresses the gap between what is and what ought to be. Technically, this is no small accomplishment: Mason’s genius in Shiloh and Other Stories lies in developing a style that acutely registers the alienating effects of mediated reality by submitting fully to that mediation. As Peter Burger observes, “An art no longer distinct from the praxis of life but wholly absorbed in it will lose the capacity to criticize it,” rendering impossible any “critical cognition of reality.”28 It is precisely that absorption, I argue, that Mason so carefully cultivates as a means of documenting a mode of cultural production that, as Jameson puts it, “can no longer gaze directly on some putative real world, at some reconstruction of a past history which was once itself a present; [but] rather, as in Plato’s cave, . . . must trace our mental images of that past upon its confining walls” (25). The paradox here is that the walls cannot be experienced as walls, but rather as the total absence of enclosure. More broadly, Mason documents the inability of her characters to generate cognitive maps, to position themselves with an “articulated ensemble which can be retained in memory and which the individual subject can map and remap along the moments of mobile, alternative trajectories.”29 In this sense, the simultaneously liquidated and frozen terrains of western Kentucky map neatly against Jameson’s late capitalist cartographies. But if the end of history, as I have suggested earlier, has itself to be historicized, the same might be said for the end of the end of history. Just as Francis Fukuyama’s thesis seems anachronistic in a post–9/11 world that looks as dialectical as ever, so might Jameson’s own moment of greatly exaggerating history’s death.30 Without investing too much in the sequence, I want to position Shiloh and Other Stories in a similar posture relative to the work of James Wilcox to which we now turn. From Modern Baptists (1983), published the year after Mason’s collection, Wilcox moves subtly but surely from Mason’s radically deterritorialized world toward one in which space is artificially reterritorialized and tenuously themed. If Mason generates a style inside of which

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cognitive mapping is impossible, Wilcox’s style simply renders it uncanny, resuscitating in the process Mason’s dead South as a late South in both senses of the term. If Mason liquidates culture, we might say that in Wilcox it returns weirdly congealed. l In stark contrast to Mason’s zero degree irony, James Wilcox’s style registers well up the ironic scale—so far, in fact, that it tends to double back on itself, moving beyond what Wayne Booth calls stable irony, in which irony codes messages using a shared set of norms, to butt up against unstable irony. In unstable irony, Booth explains, “the truth asserted or implied is that no stable reconstruction can be made out of the ruins revealed through the irony” since, in an “inherently absurd” universe, “all statements are subject to ironic undermining.”31 Of Wilcox’s Tula Springs novels, Hugh Ruppersburg writes that “characters and landscape are presented without much authorial commentary, as commonplace fact, with no ironic context to inform us that something about them is askew.”32 I would invert this assessment exactly to claim that Wilcox’s irony exists in surplus, that excessive irony leaves both character and landscape perpetually askew, and yet in a way—and here Ruppersburg acutely recognizes a central feature of Wilcox’s stylistics—that is continually recuperated as (to borrow the title of one novel) “plain and normal.” 33 Perhaps no writer since James Thurber has so elegantly linked the absurd and the everyday. Consider, for example, the following passage from Wilcox’s second Tula Springs novel, North Gladiola (1985), in which Korean doctoral candidate Duk-Soo Yoon confronts the interlocking problem of space and dissertations: He needed the Courvoisier—his only real luxury in life—to help dull his anxiety about the chapter he had to rewrite, in which he hoped to demonstrate how Freud’s equation of heimlich (homely; secret) with its opposite, unheimlich (uncanny), was integrally related to tourism. . . . Myrtice had been looking forward to seeing what north Louisiana looked like—she had never been there before—but when the group finally arrived in the town, she claimed it looked just like Tula Springs. This in turn reminded DukSoo of a remark that E.M. had made a few days earlier. E.M. didn’t understand what the big deal was about the Mason-Dixon line—he and Myrtice had been arguing about it—since everything south of it looked the same as everything north. Duk-Soo called this phenomenon, where the unfamiliar place turns out to look familiar (Freud’s unheimlich effect), Reisetäuschung, a

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neologism that his adviser, Dr. Barnes, claimed was meaningless, but let him use nonetheless, after an impassioned verbal defense by the doctoral candidate. ... An existential dilemma was posed: if everywhere was dependent for its identity, its sign, on somewhere it was not, then one ended up with no actual “here” at all, only a perilous semantic obfuscation of “there.” And even when one seemed to be dealing with a “here” and not a “there,” a nebulous cloud of ambiguity descended on the meaning.34 Beginning more or less where Mason remains, with the absorption of anxiety by commodity, the passage goes on to mark “existential dilemma” as a crisis of space and of signs: the “perilous semantic obfuscation” of “here” and “there.” But unlike in Mason, peril and parody go hand in hand: everything in the passage, not least the inflated diction of “perilous semantic obfuscation,” gravitates toward farce. From the “real luxury” of Courvoisier to the burlesque of geographical difference to the petty dissertation politics at a third-rate state university, everything is gently, and comically, out of kilter. At the same time, Duk-Soo’s slightly ridiculous but uncannily apt cognition of space is embedded in a set of palpably social scenarios. Even (and perhaps especially) in disarray, cognitive maps have consequences. In attempting to chart what I want to call Wilcox’s ironic mappings, by which I mean to conflate the stylistic dissonance and spatial disorientation that characterize his fiction, I take as a point of departure Jameson’s now-classic depiction of the postmodern pastiche, wherein “parody finds itself without a vocation,” having been divested of “parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists.”35 Wilcox, I argue, dwells in pastiche in order to restore parody, an effort that acquires a spatial analogue in the recurring desire of his characters to return home. Although, as Ruppersburg suggests, Wilcox’s stylistics ostensibly collapse the opposition between healthy and abnormal, there is still plenty of laughter in Tula Springs and, as I shall argue, a fitful and tentative recovery of normality, whatever nebulous cloud of ambiguity might descend on its meaning. Such clouds are well-nigh ubiquitous in Tula Springs and often hover directly over “here” and “there”—that is to say, the situated use of space orients identities and social practices in a disorienting way. If, as Lefebvre suggests, each society offers up its own peculiar space, Wilcox is arguably the late South’s foremost literary cartographer; he is also, I suggest, the late South’s most perceptive novelist of man-

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ners.36 The one claim follows the other because Wilcox connects maps and manners, representing social practices as literally grounded in space. Rarely, however, does space acquire coherence or integration. In contrast to the bounded homogeneity of Karon’s Mitford, Tula Springs is a collection of interstices and nodes. Even as a small town, it possesses many properties associated with the modern metropolis, which, according to Edward Soja, “we can no longer hope to map . . . because we can no longer assume that we know ‘its extremes, its borders, confines, limits.’ ” “It is more difficult than ever,” Soja writes, “to represent the city as a discrete geographical, economic, political, and social unit rooted in its immediate environs and hinterlands. The boundaries of the city are becoming more porous, confusing our ability to draw neat lines separating what is inside as opposed to outside the city; between the city and the countryside, suburbia, the non-city.”37 Capital works to evacuate Tula Springs as it is drawn centripetally toward ascendant suburbs, strip malls, gated developments, and bedroom communities. Business is perpetually slow at the downtown Sonny Boy Bargain Store, which comes as close as anything else to the fictional center of Tula Springs, until finally, having survived the indifferent labor of Burma LaSteele and the inept management of Bobby Pickens in Modern Baptists, it is bought out by a chain in Heavenly Days (2003), its distinctive candy counter replaced by “a display of generic bleach.” Where “painted turtles, gerbils, and roasted cashews once gave Sonny Boy its own peculiar musk, both enticing and repulsive,” the chain’s regime of mechanical reproduction gives the store an “antiseptic aura” that Benjamin would have found paradoxical.38 Similarly, McNair’s, the “men’s clothing emporium” owned by Louis Coco in North Gladiola, “languished, dependent upon a few loyal customers who felt guilty enough to buy an expensive shirt or tie to go with the suits they got at the mall” (15). The mall in question, which lies just beyond the Mississippi border, is where “everyone in Tula Springs, Louisiana, did their serious shopping” (4). Unlike The Collar Button, which fits in Mitford like a nesting doll, McNair’s resists theming; Mr. Coco’s plans to rename his emporium “The Early Bird” founder against informal market research showing that the name conjures, inexplicably, images of “peas” and “helicopters” (17, 109). Unable to attract a McDonald’s, Tula Springs celebrates with a black tie ceremony the opening of a BurgerMat and the “tremendous vitality” it will “infuse into the economic life of the Florida Parishes” (13). To be sure, Heavenly Days finds capital beginning to flow back toward Tula Springs, since the “North Shore has been pushing folks closer and closer [to Tula Springs], gas stations and 7-Elevens almost within sight of one another” (189), but even so, it is a capital flow that attenuates coherent space rather than consolidating it. What is less clear is whether coherent space ever existed. From the beginning

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of the Tula Springs novels, Wilcox takes pains to deterritorialize his fictional locale, to depict it as the haphazard effect of economic and cultural flows. Although Donna Lee Keely of Modern Baptists is on the rebound from a relationship with an urban planner, neither he nor any of his professional forebears sets foot in Tula Springs, and it shows. The evidence is everywhere. Although zoning issues recur throughout the Tula Springs novels, the essence of the town’s practice is captured by Donna Lee’s current boyfriend, FX Pickens: “Zoning, schmoning.” “Its houses either dowdy or plain,” Tula Springs fares no better in the domain of commercial architecture, where a dull collection of decorated sheds, to use Robert Venturi’s terms, is interspersed with the occasional duck: the “large shoe” in Sort of Rich (1989), for example, “that sold children’s apparel.”39 Originally settled by Tories from Virginia and the Carolinas, the area had briefly, during the early nineteenth century, “pledged allegiance to no one, not to the U.S. or Spain or even England.” This history troubles Bobby Pickens, for whom “it smacked of Communism.” “It was no wonder,” he concludes, “that even today there was a certain lack of patriotism in Tula Springs.” Around the beginning of the twentieth century, things took a turn for the worse when the Illinois Central Railroad, drawn by an emergent timber industry, “began colonizing these parishes with northerners, the shiftless kind that didn’t have sense enough to stay where they belonged.” Even though the Illinois Central departs the southern margins after the region’s pine and cypress are exhausted, the railroad leaves tracks and traces. The tracks still have a “right” (white) and “wrong” (black) side; drivers still stop at them because it’s the law.40 Accidental immigrants arriving on the tracks leave permanent descendants. In Sort of Rich, Frank Dambar recounts how his grandparents emigrated from Germany to Milwaukee, where Illinois Central “propaganda about how wonderful Louisiana was” led them to Tula Springs. By the time of the novel, Dambar is firmly installed in the town’s old boy network, so much so that he fails to capitalize on the looser flows of capital driving the new economy. Having invested in a condominium complex, Dambar resists being “too pushy, too eager to succeed” since that “was not how things were supposed to be,” and so he refuses to participate in the “new set of rules”—the “fancy wheeling and dealing,” advertising, and postmodern accounting—that eventually revives the development. Meanwhile, his wife Gretchen, whom he meets in a “tourist-trap souvenir shop on Bourbon Street” in New Orleans, is the descendant of New England blue bloods who articulates a persistent identity theme in lamenting how “awful” it was that “people came in from Chicago and exploited the natural resources.” “It’s a very colonial thing to do,” she explains, “like the English did to India, Spain and America to the Philip-

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pines. It gets me so mad.” Despite claiming to be “so excited to be in the South,” Gretchen also finds it slightly deflating. Noting, perhaps, the town’s lack of a Confederate monument, she opines that “of course, it doesn’t seem as Faulknerian as I had hoped. People don’t really seem weighed down by the Civil War.” She offends her husband by asking if Tula “was a Russian name”: “There were no Russians in Tula Springs, he insisted. Never had been. As a matter of fact, there weren’t even any springs.”41 There is, however, an Old Jefferson Davis Highway—not enough to satisfy Tony Horwitz, perhaps, but something—which leads to a nearby parish “famous for its plantations,” although the scenery is compromised by the state mental hospital, the neon-signed “MIRACLE CHURCH OF THE MILLENNIUM,” and “farms in between these tourist attractions . . . with hungry, half-wild dogs skulking in the dusty yards.” Tula Springs also possesses a “handsome old” city hall, which, “after several fires . . . ended up being Greek revival with twelve stately columns.”42 The operative words here are “ended up being,” which suggest a desultory series of architectural fashions terminating in a style that “revives” (by copying) an earlier one. Besides skulking dogs, the Confederate tableau of the Old Jeff Davis is compromised by a development called the Beáu Arts Estates—not gated, but enclosed by an electric fence—whose bad French would have delighted H. L. Mencken.43 As the Beáu Arts suggests, Tula Springs and the surrounding terrain are pockmarked with themed spaces and sites of commodified culture, some more compelling than others. In Modern Baptists, FX Pickens works briefly as the “host of a fancy plantation restaurant in the next parish,” where they “dressed him up in white tie and tails and encouraged him to sound foreign to the guests. The pay was excellent, and he was a big hit.”44 If Mama Dip’s Kitchen in Chapel Hill allows diners to put a taste of the South in their mouths, the Red Top Café just outside of Tula Springs allows them to taste not only the South (pickled pig’s feet), but Manhattan (the drink, not the clam chowder), New England (the clam chowder), and Germany (Wiener schnitzel) as well (North Gladiola 40). Downtown, Dick’s China Nights goes this one better, offering “a variety of Mandarin and Polynesian specialties, along with a full selection of French and traditional American dishes, including diet hot dogs” (82). Such hybridity-run-amok operates musically as well; Heavenly Days finds a “whitebread” fundamentalist weight-loss guru “rapping for Jesus” on a CD inauspiciously titled Rappin’ Sons of Thunder (47, 130). Tula Springs’s emergent tourist industry fares no better. By the time of North Gladiola, Tula Springs has “suddenly taken it into its head to become historical, screwing up plaques on every building that looked run-down and in need of a coat of paint,” including the local Kansas Fried Chicken (the BurgerMat equivalent of KFC). But despite what

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she considers “all this hullabaloo,” Mrs. Coco has “yet to see a single tourist come through Tula Springs” (130). The tourists, apparently, are all at the Swamp Possum Resort, which consists of an underwhelming zoo of “languishing alligators,” squirrels, and “a log cabin gift shop, the logs a veneer that looked real only from a distance of ten or fifteen feet.” But despite its shortcomings, “the advertising was so energetic—Swamp Possum was listed in several national guidebooks, thanks to Tula Springs’s Boosters’ Club—that word of mouth was effectively neutralized,” thus producing “a steady stream of dazed-looking families . . . wander[ing] fitfully in and out of the gift shop, the zoo.”45 Viewed from above, what becomes clear is that Tula Springs cannot be viewed from above. Mapping space as palimpsest and not as terrain—much less as “place” in Certeau’s sense of a stable “configuration of positions”—Wilcox privileges juxtaposition over position, vertigo over having one’s feet on the ground. If, as Karon assures us, Mitford “really is out there” irrespective of its being toured, Tula Springs can, as it were, only be toured—that is to say, its heterogeneous spaces are attached to each other only as they are subjectively “practiced” (in Certeau’s sense) by characters moving between and among them. The corollary of this is that Tula Springs uncannily reiterates the old maxim that in folk tales there is no such thing as just a path. Tourists, then, are not the only ones in Tula Springs wandering—or more often, driving—dazed. The condition of bewilderment is general, not least because themed spaces generate new forms of alienation and cognitive disarray. Much of the action of Wilcox’s novels is constituted by literal movement from one space to another, and while cars are ubiquitous—indeed, it seems to Mrs. Coco “that no one in Tula Springs ever walked anywhere” (165)46 —they are often (metaphorically speaking) spinning their wheels. Thus, while characters navigate paths that are, on the one hand, habitual and regularized—Wilcox depicts routine in a way inconceivable for Mason—on the other hand, such paths traverse spaces and nodes that offer at best a momentary stay against confusion. More often—and here the Swamp Possum Resort is paradigmatic—the stay is as confusing as the travel. As characters plug in sequentially to discrete environments and themed spaces, they find themselves perpetually thwarted in their efforts to embed identities in social domains. Seeking orientation, they find themselves disoriented. Seeking a destination, they find themselves perpetually in exile. Motion fails to operate as a vector. Again and again in Wilcox’s fiction, from Bobby Pickens running out of gas as he contemplates vehicular suicide on the Old Jeff Davis, to Gretchen Dambar fearfully eluding her husband, whom she believes to be a crazed “cracker upset because she had gone out of turn at the corner,” to Lou Jones lost on a country road too small for

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the scale of her map, psychological crisis is figured as travel gone bad, as failing to arrive safely at a destination.47 On what I want to consider (at least in passing) as a characteristic drive, Lou Jones of Heavenly Days experiences the problems of travel pervasive in and around Tula Springs. Accompanying her husband Don to a job interview, she maneuvers in, around, and past a bewildering array of spaces. Ostensibly accompanying Don because she needs Liquid Paper, “which is impossible to find in Tula Springs” (73), she substitutes her “moral support” for the motivational tape (Swim with the Sharks) that he prefers as a means of “psych[ing] himself up” (73). The Joneses depart in their BMW from their $295,000 faux-Cajun cabin, located in the gated community of Brougham Gardens. “Like a SoHo loft,” the first floor of the cabin is open, leaving Lou with the “feeling that she’s in some sort of public space, perhaps the lobby of an arts-and-crafts museum”—a feeling that likely derives from the “authentic Wallace Nutting” whatnot rigged with a security system “poised to go off at the slightest touch” (89, 88). Once on the road, they pass Mawmaw’s Country Store, which Lou has always “viewed . . . with a certain grain of salt”: A real country store wouldn’t call itself a country store. And the logs look a little too trim and neat. Don flicks on the turn signal, saying that he wants to stop for gas. But Lou urges him on. She will not get gas at Mawmaw’s. Whether it’s authentic redneck or a tourist trap, it will be too pricey. Anyway, Lou feels that they should wait for a Texaco, because of the opera. Not that she approves of advertising—even underwriting is suspect. But how else would people ever get a chance to hear the more difficult masterpieces? (76) Disappointed that a recent Houston Opera performance of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron hadn’t staged Moses as “an illegal alien wandering in from Mexico,” Lou has her attention diverted to a water tower proclaiming “FREE HBO & VIDE-O! POKER . . . to the weary” (77). When Don zooms past a police car, Lou realizes that the driver is a dummy: “Lou gets a glimpse of platinum Barbie-like hair and pouting red lips. Probably a discontinued mannequin, something that no decent store would be caught dead with today” (78). Finally arriving at the St. Jude Yacht Club, the site of Don’s interview with the MaxCo VP, Lou again registers her disapproval of themed space, this one a refuge for “old farts and yuppies who’d fled” from New Orleans and “gentrified the entire North Shore, raising property values in a ripple effect as far north as Tula Springs.” “If Lou had the power,” the nar-

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rative continues, “she’d deport them all back to the city, where they could learn to get along with their fellow citizens” (79). Having navigated an astonishing range of spaces and simulacra in the space of an hour, Lou finds literally at every turn an identitarian scenario waiting to be materialized. Spaces tell her who she is, or rather who she isn’t, since her characteristic relation to space is antagonistic, especially when spaces bear traces of simulation or cultural commodification. Mawmaw’s won’t suffice: its suspiciously trim, neat logs give it away, and Lou isn’t buying.48 Even Texaco’s underwriting of opera—the one cultural form of which she approves—proves suspect, immediately to be corrected by a spatial scenario more in harmony with Lou’s politically liberal identity themes: a Mexican Moses in exodus to Houston. The problem is that Lou’s journey ends where in begins—in a white flight enclave—as she moves from her vertiginous home to the stability of the St. Jude Yacht Club, where she can disapprove in a way that doesn’t hit home: these, she insists, are the real yuppies fleeing from their fellow citizens. But travel as disavowal keeps her on the road; she lacks a destination. Yet even as Lou navigates surfaces and simulacra, her journey obtains a certain weight as a quest for the real thing, a search for home. Earlier, during a visit Lou makes to a mall, we learn that “Lou doesn’t believe in malls. Whenever she can, she makes a point of not shopping in one” (30): “The mall’s stale, recycled air, the tepid tea in a flimsy cup, the cramped seat, all make Lou feel the weariness of a transatlantic passenger on a chartered flight. Yet at the same time she’s dogged by a tourist’s faith that she’s going somewhere important, that over these dark, fathomless time zones lie celebrated, ageless ruins. The real thing. No chintzy Vegas pyramids or antiseptic canals” (36). No VIDE-O! POKER or Vegas simulacra for this weary traveler, but the real thing. Against the farcical nature of the quest—here exacerbated by Lou’s alignment of authenticity with primitivism, since she’d “give [her] eyeteeth” to live in mall-less Mombasa (30)—is counterpoised a poignant lack. Existentially homeless, she makes the mistake of confusing home with house, most explicitly in her desire for the house of her deceased in-laws, which, despite being “in need of paint, is real” (85). Having acquired the landscaped patina that “only time, slow painful years” can bring, this house makes her own neighborhood, “Brougham Gardens—with its $350,000 homes—seem like a project in comparison” (85).49 For Lou, home is where she isn’t; her project is to get there. In “From Pilgrim to Tourist,” Zygmunt Bauman observes that “for pilgrims through time, the truth is elsewhere; the true place is always some distance, some time away.” Embedded in what he subtitles a “Short History of Identity,” Bauman’s observation bears intimately, I suggest, on the spatial work of Wilcox’s narrative, which seeks to reverse the historical shift described in the essay’s title.50 Wilcox,

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that is, strives, through close attention to the seam between pilgrimage and tourism, to restore tourists as pilgrims, as serious seekers with a sense, however hazy, of destination. According to Bauman, the ascendancy of tourism as a model of postmodern identity results historically from the success of pilgrims in making “the world solid by making it pliable, so that identity could be built at will, but built systematically, floor by floor and brick by brick.” For Bauman, modern pilgrims “had a stake in the solidity of the world they walked; in a kind of world in which one can tell life as a ‘sense-making’ story, such a story as makes each event the effect of the event before and the cause of the event after, each age a station on the road pointing toward fulfilment [sic].” But their expertise as “identity-builders” proved excessive: as the technologies of identity building expanded, the plasticity of the world so constructed made identities harder to preserve. In a “world inhospitable to pilgrims,” Bauman argues, the pilgrim-cum-tourist is placed in a quandary: how to “distinguish a forward march from going in circles.” With some precision, this not only describes the dilemma confronting Wilcox’s protagonists, but also elucidates his stylistic disruption of incremental and broadly coherent causal scenarios. Neither lives nor narratives cohere in legible sequences of cause and effect; both go here and there, there and here, and they do so increasingly as Wilcox’s narratives have, over the course of his career, become more episodic and less character driven. The development of Wilcox’s style, in other words, reflects Bauman’s assertion that the erosion of “pilgrim-style ‘progress’ ” makes time “no longer a river, but a collection of ponds and pools.” Most crucially, however, Bauman elucidates the identitarian consequences of Tula Springs’s incoherent spaces: how does one build a self with so many artificial and impermanent environments, each potentially embedding an idea of self discontinuous with the last? How does one tell one’s life as sense-making story when identities and spaces can be “adopted or discarded like a change of costume”?51 l Identity, Bauman suggests, “was born as a problem (that is, as something one needs to do something about—as a task),” and a problem that arises simultaneously with social disembedding—that is, “whenever one is not sure of where one belongs; that is, one is not sure how to place oneself among the evident variety of behaviourial styles and patterns, and how to make sure that people around would accept this placement as right and proper, so that both sides would know how to go on in each other’s presence.”52 In turning now to a more sustained analysis of a single novel, North Gladiola, I want to explore at greater length how Wilcox maps the negotiation

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of heterogeneous behavior styles. If, as I have suggested, mapping and manners go hand in hand, how, more precisely, do social practices both generate and respond to the sense of not being sure where one belongs? That Ethyl Mae Coco isn’t sure is clear from the beginning—even before that, in fact, since the novel’s two epigraphs—the first, from the book of Hebrews (“These all died in faith, not having received what was promised . . . having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth”) and the second, from Puccini’s opera Manon Lescaut (“E nulla! nulla! / Arida landa . . . non un filo d’acqua”)—frame a scenario of exile prior to the narrative proper. It begins, in turn, with a seamless transition from Manon to Mrs. Coco: “For Manon, Louisiana was the end of the world, France’s Siberia, and so, on some days, did it also seem to Mrs. Coco, who fancied herself an exile of sorts, even though Brookhaven, Mississippi, where she was born and where her brother and sister still lived, was only an hour’s drive north.” Finding “herself daydreaming about Mississippi, wondering what it would have been like . . . if she had stayed with her own people, good Baptists who would have killed for her,” Mrs. Coco wonders further, Would life seem such a burden in Mississippi? No, there was something about Louisiana, something oppressive that she felt every time she crossed the state line on her way back from the mall in Mississippi, where everyone in Tula Springs, Louisiana, did their serious shopping. The nice divider that Mississippi had in its highway, planted with azaleas and camellias, suddenly disappeared in Louisiana . . . [where] everything was so untidy. . . . Perhaps Manon was lucky, after all, to have died young and escaped growing old in such a place. Of course, Mrs. Coco never mentioned any of this to her husband, who held Mississippi in the greatest disdain. To him it was a land of boors and rednecks, from which she had been rescued in the nick of time . . . indeed, whenever Mr. Coco was displeased with something she said, his comment would be, “That sounds like Mississippi talking.” (3–4) Like Gretchen Dambar, Mrs. Coco extracts from an earlier narrative a paradigm of her relation to space. For Gretchen, a colonialism fetish plus “trying to be rural” equals Karen Blixen, and so she uses Blixen as a template in her quest for “real values in this remote hamlet where everyone wasn’t caught up in all the hype that had made her life in New York such a burden.”53 For Mrs. Coco, a musical bent plus the burden of exile in untidy Louisiana equals Manon.54 Modeling one’s life on a literary character is, of course, nothing new; as René Girard

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shows in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, the pattern goes back to Don Quixote and Madame Bovary.55 Wilcox’s variation on the theme stresses the spatial dimension of mediated desire: by providing a model of the spaces toward which desire presses, the literary text provides an account of the spaces one actually inhabits. As Manon, Mrs. Coco is able to tell her life as sense-making story starring herself as the tragic victim of dislocation, beset on all sides by ungrateful children, a husband with a slanderous disregard for Mississippi, and a poignant lack of good Baptists who would have killed for her. (Never mind that when she returns home to Mississippi later in the novel, she’s soon ready to kill those very Baptists.) Manon, in short, brings order to an untidy terrain by locating home elsewhere, thus accounting for the condition of exile in the present environment. By sanctioning alienation as exile, Manon does for Mrs. Coco what Amadis of Gaul did for Don Quixote: places her in a fantasy world where she is forever tilting at windmills. What is worse, the windmills tilt back. We see this, for example, in Mrs. Coco’s relationship with her husband, who almost literally lives in a different state. His sense-making story has him rescuing the damsel in distress from the land of boors and rednecks, not tearing her from the land of daydreams, superior malls, and nice highway dividers. In the meantime, their son Sam fails to make such fine distinctions among the southern states. Believing that “the entire South was racist and fascist,” he moves “as far north as he could, way up in Banff” (68), where he weaves thousand-dollar bedspreads, one of which “makes a very personal statement about acid rain” (240). Calibrated exactly to built identities, themed space acquires tactical value precisely as its collective, social dimension deteriorates. This dynamic operates in smaller spaces as well, most notably in the Coco house on North Gladiola, where coherence is compromised both architecturally and socially. Originally a boarding house, the structure had been sawed in half to make room for the Bessie Building, leaving it with a “handsome black oak staircase that led into a wall” (26).56 Undaunted, Mrs. Coco “had managed, on a very limited budget, to subdue the too-large, dank, Victorian space” of the first floor—the only one on which company is allowed—“with a semblance of taste and refinement” (25), including a “nylon Navajo rug whose colors picked up the yellows and orange of a print of New England woods in autumn” (26). Matters of design and household economy register in an idiom inflected by Mrs. Coco’s sensibility, thus lending a tone of disapproval to the household objects accumulated by her husband: the “new Craftmatic Adjustable bed, which Mrs. Coco could not look at without seeing red” (27); a creamer Mr. Coco buys because he is “tired of being ashamed of our coffee service” (63); and a pile of “manure Mr. Coco had been forced to buy for the garden, it was such a bargain. . . . Was that man ever going to learn?” (29).

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Exasperated by her husband’s expenditures, Mrs. Coco complains in a letter about his “buying a round of drinks for a table of Lions or Elks or some such nonsense” and, “not satisfied with that,” purchasing the next day “a Waterford!! vase for the living room” (125). The exclamation points belong to Mrs. Coco, but the vase does not: she returns it, causing her husband to sulk (125). Given the narrative’s focalization through Mrs. Coco, it is less immediately apparent that Mr. Coco’s built identity acquires a spatial dimension as he attempts to organize his life as an expert. Bargains, smart shopping, and an impressive coffee service correlate to his fatherly reliance on 29 Ways to Have Wholesome Fun With Your Son (though his son “used to cry when his father made him play one of the tedious games suggested by the PhD author” [27]), his husbandly project of forcing Mrs. Coco to “tack up a Daily List of Accomplishments in her laundry room” (18), and his ineffective efforts to retheme McNair’s as “The Early Bird” in order to suggest “industry, opportunity, optimism” (17). Like Leroy Moffitt in Mason’s “Shiloh,” Mr. Coco posits expertise as the solution to a home gone awry, but as with Leroy, reality proves recalcitrant. The same holds true for Mrs. Coco, whose understanding of identity as task— more precisely, of identity as burden—confronts a truly daunting set of obstacles that condemn to perpetual failure her efforts to design and orchestrate. For if design encompasses broadly her attempts to command space, orchestration might best describe her efforts to synchronize or harmonize social scenarios. As the founder and leader of the Pro Arts Quartet, she engages in a farcically Menckenian attempt to bring culture to the masses, thus reproducing her own acquisition of culture. “Early in the marriage,” we learn, “hoping to smother any trace of Mississippi, the former Ethyl Mae Bickford had immersed herself in culture” by studying French and taking up the violin (4). Tula Springs’s high culture deficit, however, remains stubbornly resistant to her labors; the Pro Arts Quartet simply cannot compete with the likes of Gerald R and his Mean Machine. At Dick’s China Nights, the quartet is valued less for its instrumentalists than for instrumental reasons: the restaurant’s manager “had read in a trade magazine that classical music stimulated the vagus nerve, so in the hopes of making people hungrier, he decided to give the Pro Arts a try” (82). During a later performance at the Miss Tula Springs Pageant, held in a “warehouse-like building that had once been a five-and-dime, then a John Deere showroom, a discount cafeteria for the aged, a pistol range, and a shoe city and was now slated to be reincarnated as a Wild West mall that was supposed to revitalize the downtown area” (181), the Pro Arts plays second fiddle to downtown revitalization, as they are relegated to background music for a “slide presentation of economic growth in St. Jude Parish” (182). The quartet also performs at Norris State Hospital for autistic and emotionally disturbed juveniles (located on a former

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sugar cane plantation), the BurgerMat, and (on audiotape, at any rate) at a DAR meeting in a house that had “almost appeared in Southern Living but had been yanked at the last minute to make space for a feature about a converted barge” (134).57 The Pro Arts personnel is just as heterogeneous as the sites they tour, consisting (at various times) of Mrs. Coco’s son George Henry, romantically torn between his lesbian ex-wife and a Jewish woman who sells hot tubs; Myrtice Fitt, DAR member and cultivator of “shallow relationships” of the kind Mrs. Coco “hadn’t the time to cultivate” (24); Emmanuel Miller, 12-year-old violin prodigy; and Duk-Soo Yoon, 49-year-old Korean graduate student in tourism, fervent anticommunist, and secret admirer of Mrs. Coco. Predictably enough, the quartet’s performances are entirely unpredictable, forever plagued by musicians lost on the highway, inept performances, money squabbles, and profound disconnections between the social styles practiced by the group members. “Slightly ashamed of what the Pro Arts did to the music of the great masters,” Mrs. Coco comes to find the music itself “insipid,” a valuation resonant with the disarray in which she finds her life (87). Plagued by “twentieth-century dissonance” (88), the Pro Arts leaves Mrs. Coco, “having launched out on . . . a voluntary exile involving a praxis of unfamiliar sights, sounds, and tastes impacting upon [her], . . . ready to complete the circular paradigm by returning home” (196–97). This language, which comes from a draft of Duk-Soo’s dissertation, is both radically ironized—next to the “logic” Duk-Soo deploys in his scholarly praxis, his dissertation adviser has written “What logic?” (197)—and uncannily descriptive of North Gladiola’s narrative trajectory. In simplest terms, the novel maps a terrain resistant to plots because it is, in Bauman’s terms, inhospitable to pilgrims. Efforts to articulate the self within a social domain and as part of a sense-making story founder against the baffling, incoherent, and highly fragmented world confronting the self, a world wherein solid foundations forever give way to the freefloating and vertiginous play of surface and simulacra. Lacking a place to stand, Mrs. Coco lacks leverage, and thus stands as symptomatic of the inhabitants of Wilcox’s fictional domain, as she does in her compensatory efforts to formulate codes that will allow her to navigate such a world. Seeking to plug into social machines, she finds broken circuits; seeking to fashion her life as a project, she finds that in Tula Springs all missions are quixotic. In a homeless world, home-makers seem condemned to excess as their self-fashioning succumbs to the logic of the identitarian hobbyhorse.58 Efforts to position oneself simply expose the difficulties of cognitive mapping in the desert of the real. At the same time, however, attempts to press into a social reality—to make contact—are never quite contemptible. The desire for recognition, the need to somehow project the self, to leave one’s mark

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continually enacts what Jonathan Matthew Schwartz defends, in In Defense of Homesickness, as the “urge to feel at home, to recognize one’s surroundings and belong there.”59 Recognition drives Mrs. Coco’s uncanny return home, not least because her own misprisions generate the machinery of alienation. Attempting to cram those around her into plots of her own liking, she alienates them, thereby exacerbating her own exile. The crucial action of Mrs. Coco’s recovery of home involves the recognition of her grandson, Ray Jr., the schizophrenic child (I will return to the diagnosis momentarily) of an affair between her daughter Helen Ann and the already married Mayor Binswanger. Although Mrs. Coco believes that the pregnancy was terminated—a staunch Catholic, she suffers guilt for advising the abortion—she experiences from her first contact with Ray Jr. what she comes later to understand as “an irrational, sinful tenderness that the boy brought out in her,” a feeling that could “be conveniently labeled” as “maternal affection,” even though the label “didn’t really describe the contents of the package being smuggled through” (257). “Like most genuine love,” the narrative continues, “it knew nothing of customs, nothing of boundaries. If Mrs. Coco chose to believe in the label, it was only with a small part of her mind, the part that had to deal with what she called the real world” (257). Ray Jr. has a similar effect on Duk-Soo, who, despite renouncing his responsibility for the “pseudo-schizophrenic” (205), is “forced to conclude” that Ray Jr. “did leave one feeling . . . that one had loved him in some dim, obscure way” (231). Ray Jr. leaves one feeling this way because he desires and demands unmediated connection: hugs, touch, love. As his diagnostically acute psychiatrist Dr. Jewel observes, Ray Jr. is “fine, just fine, as long as he’s getting his love” (163). There are obstacles to such reception. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that “schizophrenia is like love” in that both elude classification as “phenomenon or entity.” The classification, they argue, of schizophrenia as an “entirely separate and independent entity” produces the “artificial schizophrenic found in mental institutions: a limp rag forced into autistic behavior.”60 Whatever its diagnostic validity, this describes with some precision Ray Jr.’s relation to industrial psychology: opposing Dr. Jewel’s unorthodox treatment of holding and stroking his patients is the professional (and specifically Freudian) praxis of Dr. Lily Oustelet, the executive director of Norris State who classifies Ray Jr. as a way of transporting him efficiently through a series of institutions terminating in his incarceration in the state mental hospital in Florence. But before being sedated into a limp rag, Ray Jr. does the essential work of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizo: he “scrambles all the codes.” “Constantly subjected to interrogation, constantly cross-examined,” he responds by shifting “from one

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code to the other.” As Mrs. Coco attempts to plant “the seeds of Christianity and democracy in this poor boy’s soul,” he mixes codes—material and spiritual (“how much does Jesus Christ Our Savior weigh?” [118]), political and religious (“Then how does [God] get elected? . . . It’s no fair if they’s no voting” [119])—as he wedges open the disjunctions of the questions “put to him,” as Deleuze and Guattari say, “in terms of the existing social code.”61 The effect on Mrs. Coco is disorienting: her own codes become scrambled. Talking with Ray Jr. about “what it would be like when they died,” Mrs. Coco suspends her inquisition when “Ray Jr. told her it would probably be like the time the sun came down and hit him and he had sharp leaves in his toes. Instead of stopping him Mrs. Coco had encouraged him to go on, even though she knew this sort of talk was wrong, that it had nothing to do with the catechism, which was what he should be learning” (175). The rote formulae— good Catholic, unappreciated mother, artist in exile—by which she navigates social spaces are themselves collapsed, confused, scrambled. Visiting Ray Jr. at the schizo warehouse in Florence, she becomes suspicious of codes themselves: “No more words, because almost every word she had spoken to him, about him, was a lie. And this was what the lies amounted to, this room with a rubber sheet on the fourth floor of the loony bin” (251). Climbing into bed with Ray Jr., she realizes that “there never was and never would be a Saint Ethyl Mae of Tula Springs. There was simply a woman who was tired of crying ‘Unclean’ wherever she went, who was hoping finally, after all this time, to be touched” (252). That touch and not words mark Mrs. Coco’s epiphany suggests that North Gladiola is, in the final analysis, a story of discipline and desire, and if the novel is primarily concerned with the disciplinary protocols by which social spaces are held in a kind of intact disarray, it is equally true that the recovery of home as a condition of belonging depends on working through the repressive praxis governing the text’s (ab)normal social domain. Again, Duk-Soo’s dissertation is uncannily and uneasily on point, noting Freud’s demonstration of the “intimate connection between heimlich (‘homely’), heimisch (‘native’), and heimlich (‘concealed, secret, private’)” and his conclusion that the uncanny (das Unheimliche) is “in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (197). That repression governs Mrs. Coco’s mental work is clear enough; from her abstemious attitude toward household expenditure to her sexual frigidity—“You never did like sex, did you?” her husband asks in a moment of straight talk (68)—she carefully censors desire in an effort to maintain order. Yet even after her disavowal of “crying ‘Unclean’ ” as she lies next to Ray Jr., there remains the work of homecoming. In the novel’s final chapter, this return has two separate movements, the first

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involving the code of contamination as it reemerges relative to the father, Mayor Binswanger. Her daughter having taken Ray Jr. to live in Australia, Mrs. Coco contents herself that at a distance, Helen Ann and her son will be able to “avoid further contamination from that man” (258). Moreover, Mrs. Coco is now armed with the knowledge of Binswanger’s illegitimate son, information she can use to ruin his political career by passing it along to his wife. “There was,” she believes, “justice after all. One did not have to wait for heaven for Right to win out” (263). But endowed with the “power to do some good with her life” (263), Mrs. Coco passes on the opportunity, simply smiling at the “hardened face” of the mayor’s wife as she goes to her husband’s car, its “back door already open” (264). The juxtaposition of this unexpected gesture and the incipient return home drives home a causal sequence: recognizing Mr. Coco enables her act of forgiveness. Having just performed with the Pro Arts Quartet at a funeral, she is, “after all this time, finally able to hear” his voice as the “fifth voice” of the quartet playing, for once, in harmony, “all the voices” present: “The voice was, of course, his, the love of her life’s, and coming as it did from the other end of the world, one had to be very still inside to hear it, the hush, the silence” (264). Hearing him is in turn linked to seeing him from a new angle, from “a vantage point in the loft” from which his balding head appears “as pink as a baby’s behind” (264). Perhaps she has been listening to the funeral elegy delivered by a Mormon bishop, who also (in a juxtaposition altogether typical of Tula Springs) runs a “thriving catfish farm out on the Old Jeff Davis Highway” (254). “How many of us,” the bishop asks, “shut ourselves off in our glass houses and peer out at the world, afraid to soil our hands, our faces?” (255). It is the right question asked in the wrong key. Like Father Fua, the Samoan Catholic priest who earlier has urged Mrs. Coco to “fight to love, fight every day, every minute” after diagnosing her spiritual crisis as the effect of menopause, the Mormon bishop articulates the moral center of the novel in a compromised tongue—here, one contaminated with the dialect of self-help and standardized remembrance. To borrow Jameson’s language, there are only abnormal tongues in Tula Springs, only dissonant codes. But among the twentieth-century dissonance and preponderance of glass houses, there remains the possibility of harmonies and homes. Traveling home to North Gladiola, Mrs. Coco takes a path that is unavailable in the homeless world of Bobbie Ann Mason and unnecessary in the always, already “at home” world of Jan Karon. But as my analysis has suggested, the possibility of pilgrimage throws into sharper relief the problem of tourism that DukSoo has already considered relative to North Gladiola. “Take North Gladiola, for instance,” he thinks as he considers the touristic implications of the uncanny: “It

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was in the southern half of Tula Springs, and furthermore, there existed no South Gladiola, no Gladiola even. What did North in this case signify? And why Gladiola? The street was not a flower, not even a metaphorical flower, being as it was in the heart of the business district. Was it named after another North Gladiola by a homesick settler from Virginia or Illinois, thus making a North Gladiola not a ‘here,’ after all, but a ‘there’?” (98). North Gladiola ends with a return to a “here,” not to an actual arrival there. Home, in other words, is always relative and always at a slight distance.

chap ter 6 southern homes after the family Deregulated Reality in Barry Hannah and Josephine Humphreys

In Eros and Civilization (1955), Herbert Marcuse called attention to the “decline of the social function of the family” in a capitalist society “under the rule of economic, political, and cultural monopolies.” For Marcuse, the Oedipal conflict had been supplanted by “a whole system of extra-familial agents and agencies” (experts, mass media) as the primary site of socialization, a transition that loosened the “living links between the individual and his culture” and eroded the reality principle as it was acquired under the old dispensation. For Marcuse, of course, the story did not end happily: a new form of alienation emerged from the repressive efforts of a new capitalist system—diffused into a faceless “anonymity” of economic power—that proved no better than the Fathers it supplanted.1 In this chapter, I examine two novels, Barry Hannah’s Yonder Stands Your Orphan and Josephine Humphreys’s Rich in Love, that orient themselves more or less in relation to Marcusian coordinates. They are, as I hope to show, post-familial narratives. But the “post-” here, as always, signals less a condition of alterity than a dialectical relation. Families are still around, and so is the South. What has deteriorated is the family’s primacy as the site of socialization and the origin of cultural discipline. Both Hannah and Humphreys interrogate the problem of navigating a post-territorial South wherein reality-production is experienced as discontinuous and uneven. Both narratives strive after strategies of the real that might recover vertiginous spaces as homes, as sites of belonging and not of alienation. Both narratives seek to protect habitats from the invasive pressures of a late southern economy that assaults locality, colonizes desire, and turns everything into a fake. In the end, however, the two narratives could hardly be more different. Although both experience the loss of family as a loss of reality, Hannah’s diagnosis of reality homesickness terminates in the recovery of territorialized space. By contrast, Rich in Love moves in a more nomadic direction as its protagonist, Lucille Odom, ultimately evades the disciplinary protocols of home. As we shall see, desire is the problem in Yonder Stands Your Orphan; in Rich in Love, it is the cure. At the conclusion of Never Die, Barry Hannah’s venture to the West and the western, Fernando Muré rejects the idea that he will be rendered a hero in a West shrouded in nostalgia: “Thing is, it was all wrong and I am a villain. Except. I’m here

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studying up how I can make the next years fine ones, by my little Stella. I mean to be something extraordinary and make a high mark for good.” His physical disfigurement gives him, he says, “a whole lot better chance” by exiling him from the provinces of romantic iconography.2 The opposition here between a crudely articulated humanism—“making a high mark for good”—and an escape from representation is typical of Hannah’s later work, which characteristically posits a domain of ethical action besieged by images, roles, scripts, codes, and themed spaces that threaten to colonize and eradicate the real. In Yonder Stands Your Orphan, Ulrich articulates the theme in pure form: “We don’t love each other as much as we used to. You can see the uncertain looks, the calculations, the dismissals. People are not even in the present moment. Everybody’s been futurized. . . . And who gets the highest pay? Actors. Paid to mimic life because there is no life. You look at everybody and maybe they’re a little sad, some of ‘em. They’re all homesick for when they were real.”3 For Ulrich, the decay of love correlates to the ascendance of actors. In this chapter, I read Yonder Stands Your Orphan as a culmination of Hannah’s concern with pathological mimicry, as an epic bracketing of a clumsy, inarticulate humanism by representational systems that gravitate toward fantasy and abjection. A meditation on pornography understood strictly and as a wider set of practices through which desire is directed toward an imaginary object, Hannah’s novel imagines a redemptive space in which common decency—in the final analysis, it is little more than that—might operate as a social practice held in common. Diagnosing homesickness for the real as cultural pathology, the narrative strives to recover the real as territory—that is to say, a desire for reality acts as both the symptom of and antidote to a widely diffused and malignant homesickness. The deeply paradoxical nature of this relation produces a series of utopian gestures, attempts to wed desire and reality that degenerate into patterns of decay, degradation, and brutal abjection. But against the novel’s dominant momentum of monstrous utopias, abject fantasies, and eroded reality runs a countercurrent of redemption in a minor key, of the “small acts of kindness” that constitute “almost all of life that’s beautiful” (94). The novel’s ultimate concern, however, is not so much to delineate these acts as to imagine a space wherein they might be practiced. The regime of the simulacrum, of empty performance, and of deadening consumption necessitates for Hannah an apocalyptic humanism organized around the disparate topoi of animals, music (as an expressive form uncorrupted by representation), and Christian redemption (as a vague logic). In attempting to analyze reality homesickness as a sociohistorically distinctive malady, I want to locate Eagle Lake, Mississippi, the “home” toward which the novel’s comic trajectory moves, in relation to the surrounding dystopian terrain

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of Big Marts, bad restaurants, tourist traps, and Vicksburg casinos, the last described by one character as “math become a monster” (229). This is the world of what Hannah calls “pawn shop culture,” where an economy built on despair subjects even the family to its implacable laws of supply and demand: “Were the laws not just a little too stiff, you’d probably have found used children there” (281).4 This is the world of Man Mortimer, perhaps the most fully realized and socially specific antagonist in Hannah’s oeuvre. In its close attention to Mortimer’s entrepreneurial genius as pimp and pornographer, Yonder Stands Your Orphan explores a post-Fordist regime of flexible accumulation in which economic and pseudosocial activity is organized around the ephemeral consumption of pleasure. For Hannah, the erosion of family correlates to alienation and the loss of reality. His “solution,” however, is not to think in Marcusian terms toward some nonrepressive civilization “beyond the reality principle,” but to imagine what reality might be shared in a “posthuman, postmodern” age—to imagine, finally, what home might look like in a world of orphans. l Following his disquisition on reality homesickness, Ulrich poses a question: “Who isn’t an orphan, I ask you?” (46). The question is pregnant because it is rhetorical: orphanhood obtains resonance not merely in (literal) relation to the orphan’s camp, but to its broader interrogation of family as a missing scenario of social regulation, and hence as distinctively implicated in a regime of pathological mimicry. Family is precisely that which the homesick for the real lack. In A Southern Renaissance, Richard King offers, by way of Freud and Otto Rank, the family romance as a paradigmatic culture myth by which the South compensated for its historical deprivations and traumas; the plantation myth, as King describes it, provides a cultural analogue for the child imaging his “real” parents to be of higher station than his biological parents.5 Hannah’s debut novel Geronimo Rex (1972), in which filial and Oedipal anxieties generate Harry Monroe’s anarchic revolt against paternalistic, bourgeois Ode Eleann and initiate the bildungsroman’s requisite search for the “spiritual” father, is entirely legible through King’s paradigm. Yonder Stands Your Orphan is, by contrast, relatively unconcerned with filiation as an organizing script of identity and desire.6 In Deleuzian terms, desire is already deterritorialized, irrevocably severed from the territorial socius and its organizing Oedipal drama, while orphanhood, registering at the outset the absence of family structure, operates as a default condition.7 Put simply, the family romance is unavailable either as compensatory fantasy or as a mechanism of social regulation and coded,

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territorialized desire. This is not to say that family goes missing, but that its existence follows the logic of the degraded counterfeit: there are no real families in the novel, only ineffective and desperate attempts to fake them. In relating this shift to the novel’s broader concern with economy, I return to Deleuze and Guattari’s account of how capitalism, after decoding and deterritorializing flows of desire, “institutes or restores all sorts of residual and artificial, imaginary, or symbolic territorialities, thereby attempting, as best it can, to recode, to rechannel persons who have been defined in terms of abstract quantities.” “Everything,” they write, “returns or recurs: States, nations, families.” Although, as I want to argue momentarily, Hannah depicts capitalism as more symptomatic than causal and agential— at least, his causal patterns are more ambiguous than Deleuze and Guattari’s—a recursive movement to artificial territoriality and the family pervades the novel, ultimately organizing itself around the figure of the home, which, in situating the family in space, acts as a central site toward which reality homesickness is directed. But no less than in the world of Bobbie Ann Mason, Hannah’s simulated homes prove radically inaccessible. The most spectacular failure of the sim-home occurs at the orphan’s camp. Established by Gene and Penny Ten Hoor to compensate for the death of their child, the orphan’s camp reproduces and intensifies the pathologies of the world it attempts to transcend.8 Initially, Gene and Penny are real estate developers who view the land around Eagle Lake as an abstract commodity and dream of an empire of condominiums (40). Following the death of their son, they “r[u]n out of words” and develop a fetishistic compulsion for the real, for “things you touch and hold and appraise” (244). In a mechanical attempt at verification, they begin nailing things to the wall: money (no longer abstract), fish (representative of the wetlands destroyed in their real estate ventures), and finally themselves. This excessive oscillation between the abstract and the real is replicated in the orphan’s camp, where Gene and Penny “presume to emit rays of instruction” (214) for the orphans, to whom in turn they “seemed unconnected . . . individually but joined to their collective oversoul” (53). They are parenting machines whose mechanical efforts to plug into the reproduced family—“You are the child we lost, come back to us in many souls,” they tell the orphans (331)—terminate in horror, generating a kind of familial variation on what Frankenstein does to the human body. Even their sexual relationship is mechanical, not “purely natural man-and-wife devotion but a sort of scheduled thing like a cup of coffee” (330). They defend moral abstraction with high-grade weaponry; guns in hand, they discourse endlessly “about love and trust at the center of the universe and how vigilant we should be against the Old World” (329–30). Vigilance by dynamite ultimately turns their peninsular

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camp into an island, thereby grounding their abstract project in a physical terrain separate from the “Old World” (277). In Gene and Penny, benevolence and malevolence are strangely conjoined: just as the couple’s good intentions do nothing to prevent the sexual predations of Man Mortimer, neither do they prevent Gene and Penny from being identified as predators themselves by the orphans as the camp finally succumbs to its own apocalyptic momentum (330). As the novel reiterates on several occasions, they are insane. If orphanhood is, at the most fundamental level, the condition of lacking a home, and through it coded, territorialized desire and the concomitant production and regulation of social reality, then the orphan’s camp does little to ameliorate the condition. I should clarify here, since I am borrowing the terminology of Anti-Oedipus, that the condition cries out for amelioration; in Yonder Stands Your Orphan, schizophrenia is not tapped for its revolutionary potential, nor are any radical politics located in post-Oedipal flows of desire. Homesickness for the real is a sickness, plain and simple, and its etiology implicates patterns of production and consumption. Max Raymond, the novel’s most acute diagnostician, describes the syndrome this way: “Everything about the zombie is ravaged except his obsession. . . . Dead to every other touch. They simply imitate when there is movement or sound. They imitate the conversations around them to seem human to one another. He had seen them in scores from the airports to the bandstands imitating one another, mimicking the next mimicker in no time, no space, no place, no history” (175–76). As zombie parents, Gene and Penny attempt not only to reincarnate their dead child in the orphans, but also to reterritorialize the home through the artificial space of the orphans camp. Their wish to “seem human” is, however, merely an extreme instance of a pervasive desire to verify one’s existence through the coordinates of time, space, and social reality. Compromised by representation and corrupted by consumption, the real is subjected to a dual movement toward virtuality and abjection; bodies gravitate simultaneously toward disembodiment and decay. Abstraction and rot are complementary, not oppositional. The deregulation of reality isn’t pretty. As Mimi Suarez says, “I don’t know anybody much who’s not decomposing. Even Max says people are hardly necessary anymore, and they have no acts. They tend to float away. It’s frightening” (279). In his thematically dense sermon—a jeremiad, really—Egan says . . . we have fed on the blood of our own. We are not even kind to our own retarded that so fill the Southland. We go off to other states and make fun and literature And Hollywood movies about them.

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The Best Southern Art On-Screen is Stupid and Heartwarming. But you do not know what is beyond the window of your own home. (148) Commodifying the ubiquitous retarded of the Southland is not merely objectionable traffic in stereotype9 but a profoundly antisocial, parasitic, even vampiric, act: blood is being consumed. The “wretched spectators, heads just out of your mama’s womb,” are born into a world of empty consumption: “Buy me sumpin, Ma. Plug me in” (149). Plugging under this dispensation is, however, an exercise in missed connection, and while the post-Oedipal world of missing parents might promise gratification through consumption, its desirable objects evaporate into virtuality. Dispossessed of home at the moment of birth, the orphan falls easy prey to the predators who command the economy of false gratification. l Still, homesickness persists. Here, however, it is useful to discriminate between those who are homesick and those who are simply dead. The dead include the Episcopalians, “postwar, postmodern, posthuman,” who sweep up the “waste of the stores and the storerooms [that] find their place in each consumer heart to rot and reek” (201); the zombie mimickers; the casino musicians who, “although mistaken for the living by their audiences, were actually dead. Ghouls howling for egress from their tombs” (37–38); the “weak and bored” casino patrons lured in by “dime store Legbas” (177); the doctors who have abandoned Eagle Lake for new vacation spots “where they mimicked life as best they could with the new big money” (177); the subscribers to New Deal magazine, “the organ for reformed country people who now hated nature. People who had lost farms. Settlers between town and country who wanted even less. The homes pictured were like mausoleums beside highways, no grass and not a stick of a tree in sight. Paved lawns” (125). The dead patronize the “bad restaurant,” which “served food for the dead,” and “would stay when only zombies prevailed” (175): “The bad restaurant even had bad-food loungers and loiterers, hard to shake when they got a good imitation of you going. The restaurant with its RESTAURANT sign. Its mimicking of the dining life, yet no edible food, bad water and a weak tea to go with that. Refill that beige for you, sir? Every dish served in contempt for what used to be human” (176). The homesick, by contrast, eat at “Near ‘Nuff Food,” which is “far superior” to the bad restaurant and has “A theme” (218): “medieval chaos, and people dumped buckets of ribs on a tablecloth of butcher paper” (288). As Patricia Yaeger explains in The Geography of Identity, the consump-

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tion of themed space “suggests a longing for incorporation, a longing to inhabit credible space,” and it is according to this logic, I suggest, that Near ‘Nuff Food is marked as “far superior” to the bad restaurant. Its simulation of place at least caters to a desire to inhabit credible space, a desire that preserves a residue of sociality. If the bad restaurant serves food for the dead, Near ‘Nuff Food caters to the partially living, those desperate for incorporation into something. Yonder Stands Your Orphan is an elaborate meditation on the production and consumption of space. Relatively unconcerned with the coded, space-bound territories associated with the Oedipal family, the novel directs its attention to artificial territorialities as they attempt either to reconstitute and simulate the family (the orphans camp) or to generate credible space—and hence a social grid or “communal life”—in the absence of the family romance. The production of the latter kind of space, of “home” without family, is predictably anxious and fragile, and we should clearly understand the insufficiency of Near ‘Nuff Food and its staging of medieval chaos as a means of confronting cultural pathology. But while the restaurant’s “festive and harsh” theme makes it “a success,” the most compelling theme is clearly reality itself, or rather its artificial production. Although we learn that farmed catfish is Mississippi’s leading export, local consumption is dominated by the nostalgia industry. In a state populated by “men and women nostalgic by age eleven” (40), spaces coded as authentic are desirable, most conspicuously in the novel’s prologue, where Leon Jr.’s roadhouse “harked back to the fifties” and thus becomes a “must-visit” (1, 2). The nostalgia industry sells because it reproduces both dimensions—space and time—in which Hannah’s characters find themselves dispossessed. (The redemptive potential of animals, as we shall see, depends on their unconsciously inhabiting those dimensions.) Because nostalgia is rigorously spatialized—that is, located in special places discontinuous with incoherent modernity—it offers an implicit alternative history, a located might-have-been. But because nostalgia is intrinsically narrative—a tale of history gone wrong—it attains a capacity to expand its spatial limits, ultimately broadening to reproduce the South as artificial territoriality. That Vicksburg is adjacent to Eagle Lake is no accident, since Vicksburg serves, as the novel registers on three separate occasions, as the pivot on which the South’s military fortunes turned in the Civil War, the local analogue of the classic Faulknerian scenario from Intruder in the Dust in which every “southern boy fourteen years old” can imagine (“not once, but whenever he wants it”) Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg and “think This time. Maybe this time.”10 Immediately before their mutual wounding, Man Mortimer and Frank Booth ponder a “clean head shot on Sherman or Grant”: “They agreed that one expert Navy SEAL sniper could

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have won the war that month. When slavery would have perished as an institution. It was common wisdom that the South would have given the slaves their freedom the instant they kicked the North’s ass, but that the slaves would have chosen to remain. . . . The South was so good. Why was this never discussed?” (62).11 The parody here—all the more striking as a recognizable white southern discourse— connects the alternative history it describes and nostalgia for an imagined present, the virtual “good” South “never discussed” because of “all this correctness” (62). If, as Egan says, the South is vulnerable to faking in Hollywood movies, it is equally vulnerable to the local history that waxes rhapsodic over a bizarre Lost Cause terrain. Booth and Mortimer briefly inhabit this imaginary geography as fellow citizens; that they are stabbing one another moments later suggests its tenuous social efficacy, its susceptibility to (literal) puncture. In his jeremiad, Egan exposes the charade: “We have spoken of the fall of Vicksburg as if it mattered” (149).12 Nostalgia ultimately cannot sustain credible space because it is a symptom of reality homesickness, not its antidote or cure. Crucially, nostalgia itself has run out of gas; like the dinosaur on Leon Jr.’s Sinclair sign (“God knows the actual gasoline it pumped nowadays” [3]), it seems part of an earlier era. Although the consumption of “authentic” space is less intrinsically pathological than the novel’s more overt forms of degradation, it is ultimately complicit in them. This connection is established in the prologue when Leon Jr., the careful entrepreneur of local color whose “narratives increased the cost of the liquor nearly twofold” (1), offers a new commodity: “Boys,” he says, “it’s ‘Teenage Lesbian Comedown,’ ” starring “local talent, even though it was slick as Hollywood” (4, 3). One potential customer resists the roadhouse’s emergent economy : “I don’t know. This place had a purity to it. Lowdown but pure. I hate to see him join the common, I guess go modern, you might say” (5). But his friend counter-argues that it is selfish to watch “all those poor colorful folks . . . and wis[h] they’d never change” (5), and then explains why he has purchased the video: “Nostalgia, shit, me too. I got it every second. Nothing new looks worth a shit to me. New houses seem like goddamn rest stops. We’re dirty old men, already, Robbie, face it. And even the dirt don’t seem as tasty as it used to. Now the whiskey’s talking, but I tell you. I’m willing to look at anything’ll change my life before I blow this weary head off” (5). The practice of nostalgia and the consumption of pornography thus stand in rough symmetry as attempts at virtual gratification. But Leon’s roadhouse, with its “old-time titty-girl calendar” from an era “when it was daring” (2), will no longer suffice; stronger measures are needed if suicide, which always lurks as the most logical social practice, is to be deferred. The nostalgia of Leon’s roadhouse thus gravitates incrementally to “Teenage Lesbian Comedown,” where the presence of “local talent”

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reterritorializes desire (and locality itself) in an ever more extreme and artificial way: “What it did was open your eyes to the potential in this state” (3). The video’s auteur is Man Mortimer. l In his most extended meditation on pleasure and space, Man Mortimer wanders a Vicksburg casino “casting in his head for a video”: “It’s a family dream here. What men and some women pay for, dreams nobody else talks about. You ain’t got your odors, your armpits stink. Everything smells like a new car and roses. No birth control, no AIDS, no sad sermonette the next day, no apolog y, no forgiveness. Nobody gets hurt. You get nasty, but nobody needs to kill or rob for it. This is my country” (67). Crucially, Mortimer situates his video in relation to family (“a family dream”) and space (“my country”) while simultaneously suspending whatever resistance they might offer against the pure gratification that he sells for profit. The pleasure of his text depends on the body being cited but censored (no armpits, conception, AIDS), on sexual relations being simulated (as acquiescence, since without female pleasure “it’s all queered” [68]) minus the friction involved in relationships themselves (no sermonettes, apologies, forgiveness). Bondage itself is mimicked with “light little chains”: “Fairyland bondage, like” (67). In this linkage as in others (“family dream,” “my country”), Mortimer yokes together with violence terms of the real and the virtual. His “dream” is essentially post-familial—“It’s about Onan, careless with his seed. It’s against populating the grimy little fl ybit species . . .” (68)—and his “country” is radically deterritorialized, consisting mainly of SUVs that combine the “aphrodisiacs of new-car smell and White Diamond mist” and evade the space-bound law, impotent to “touch him because his bordello was spread in myriad chambers throughout the suburbs and even underpasses” (10). That Mortimer nevertheless gestures toward the family and the state, toward an “absurd” “patriotism” (67), signals an especially acute case of reality homesickness. This is why, even as he plots his latest pornographic video, he conceives of the Internet as a virtual scapegoat, an excessive simulacrum that produces “a lonely murderous kind of nerd who wears a raincoat in his own den, stepping out into the ether thinking it’s real, realer than Mom, who he’s hammered to death because she wasn’t some Power Ranger with tits who makes waffles every day” (68). The Internet signals the utter abolition of the real, here dramatized as the murderous obliteration of the mother who has failed to gratify totally, a family romance gone bad under the pressures of virtuality. Mortimer is compelled to imagine the Internet this way because he doesn’t want to go there lest he give up even his residual connection to the real. But the artificial reproduction of desire, at which the Internet stands as a ter-

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minal limit, is Mortimer’s home ground, even if he employs local talent. His identity and the design it spawns originate in pornography: “A neighbor boy showed him a pornographic picture when he was fifteen, and the bone-deep thrill of seeing that woman in her happy pain had never left him, had never diminished. He looked for it behind every curtain of culture, of law” (50). If Mortimer’s design is more incoherent than Thomas Sutpen’s—in point of fact, he nearly stumbles into his calling—this moment acts as the equivalent of Sutpen’s being turned away from the plantation house door. Whereas paternity and dynasty organize the grand trajectory of Absalom, Absalom!, orphanhood and deterritorialized desire orient the diffuse narrative economy of Yonder Stands Your Orphan. Unlike Sutpen, for whom narcissistic trauma generates a pathologically coherent identity articulated in the territoriality of Sutpen’s Hundred, Mortimer knows himself to be a wandering counterfeit: he is a duplicate who wants to be an original, a simulacrum who wants to be real, an exile who wants to go home. And if, like Sutpen, his malignant genius obtains a certain magnitude, he is also a virtual Popeye—complete with voyeuristic tendencies (117, 287–88, 321–22)—who mechanically performs his desire with videotape instead of a corncob; a buffoonish devil who, like Walker Percy’s Art Immelman, badly mimics the human: “he seemed to be doing some imitation of warmth, friendship, trust. Childish, stilted gestures, as if studied from some old book on stagecraft” (52); a neo-Babbitt whose inferiorities are momentarily assuaged by consumption: “He felt dirty and low-rent. He went out the back and almost immediately drove at breakneck speed into Vicksburg to purchase a pair of shoes. He wanted bright white ones. Perhaps a boot, a soft suede pair you could hold in your hands while you went off to sleep in any house and feel perfectly at home” (249). Mortimer is, however, never at home, least of all in his own houses, three “strange empty homes” (325) from which he “flees one . . . to the other, the next house always a getaway from the last” (52). Similarly, his desire for Dee Allison, who “moved him in all ways” because she “could be visited but never occupied” (57), lacks altogether the comforts of home. Mortimer is a concatenation of copies—first Fabian, then Conway Twitty, finally a decomposing “thing that was hardly anything but a big head with a mass of white hair” (336)—and is himself duplicated by a rival, Frank Booth, who through plastic surgery achieves “a Conway Twitty face fresher than Mortimer’s own” (308). Mortimer’s status as pure replica has its compensations, however, since it attunes him to the virtual logic from which he extracts a healthy profit. As Slavoj Žižek explains, “ ‘monsters’ appear at every break which announces a new epoch of capital,” including “today’s emergence of ‘postindustrial’ society (the revival of the motif of the ‘living dead’).”13 A simulated man, Mortimer concentrates the nar-

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rative’s attention to zombification, a monstrous role closely aligned with his entrepreneurial virtuosity: “Men and women in this nation were changing, and he intended to charge them for it” (49). His SUVs are an elegant testimony to his command of themed space and (literally) deterritorialized desire. He capitalizes on the availability of flexible labor, offering “no retirement plan, no health insurance” because “what you did was just make money and watch out” (110). There are costs—ruined lives (“only twelve, maybe thirteen”)—all the more gruesome because his female workers eagerly desire a “step up” from their territorial fate “settl[ing] down . . . in some goddamn trailer home” with “puffed-up little dicks” who want the women “to breed more like them” (19). The deep logic of Mortimer’s economic virtuosity suggests the evacuation of social reality performed by the economy he commands, a process replicated in Mortimer’s peculiar relation to the family romance. If Freud’s scenario turns on the child’s replacement of actual parents with imagined parents as an imaginative script of social deprivation giving way to social ascent, Mortimer follows the first part of the script but not the second. Explicitly associating his parents with deprivation—he is embarrassed by their chicken yard and blames them for his not having “a fine car or any money” (50)—his “ascent” is explicitly post-familial—he desires neither surrogate parents nor actual progeny (51)—and implicitly post-social, in that his desire for money is radically severed from any social order. He desires pleasure, not position.14 For this reason, we cannot describe his career (in contrast to Sutpen’s) as an ascent (which presumes mobility within a stable social order), but rather as an incoherent series of accumulations. This incoherence is not lost on Mortimer, whose desire to incarnate himself—to exist until “they would let him back into real life” (266)—assumes ever more extreme forms. He disfigures others because he is eroding: when, in a dream, “his own mirror told him he was an impostor in the body of Conway Twitty,” he realizes “he was going to have to cut again” (255); as he muses later, “Maybe I cut because I want them to have no face too” (295).15 When his confrontation with Peden goes awry and he is “thrashed on . . . very well” (270), he is “reduced . . . nearly to ectoplasm,” which “terrified him. He had a nostalgia for himself” (298). He similarly codes his desire to inhabit the (tenuously) credible space of Eagle Lake within a nostalgic scenario: “He would become well known on the lake and finally a pride of the region when he became an elder, because you were colorful then and people liked to see you prosper. Get nostalgic about when times were colorful and wilder and better. Let go because of history and what you’d done for it. A picture of him shaking hands with the law” (277). Whereas in Never Die Fernando Muré rejects rehabilitation through nostalgia in order to “make a high mark for good,” Mortimer imagines nostalgia as retroactively sanctioning his depravity. At this late

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stage in the narrative, Mortimer’s nostalgia even extends to the parents whom previously he has “despised” (49): “Those good people. Not a finer man in the county than your postman daddy, what’s his name?” (295). For their part, his parents recognize Mortimer for what they have always known him to be, “an absence, or all things present at once . . . . a dangerous nullity” (328–29). Their epiphany punctuates and punctures Mortimer’s last spoken words in the novel, which he (fittingly) repeats: “I exist, man” (328). l Because most of the novel’s social pathologies are concentrated in Man Mortimer, his exile to prison in the novel’s epilogue, neatly paralleled by the self-exile of Sheriff Facetto (who simply “ceased being” [335]), signals an act of social hygiene. This is not to say, however, that those pathologies are not widely diffused among the core group of characters who remain and who, throughout the narrative, have been mostly impotent to resist the boundary violations made by Mortimer and Facetto. Nearly everyone works for Mortimer or owes him money. Just as Facetto seduces Melanie Wooten, so Mortimer insinuates himself within the Eagle Lake enclave, forcing several characters to enact the drama of becoming “bootlicker to a phantom” (323). Given this pervasive impotence to resist Mortimer, it becomes difficult to identify precisely the formal logic by which the novel moves toward the epilogue’s comic conclusion: if it is easy to see why Mortimer flourishes, it is more difficult to understand how the survivors endure. But endure they do, and a comic conclusion (of a sort) it is, complete with a wedding between Melanie and Harvard: John Roman and Max Raymond drew closer together, but Roman did not want anybody talking with him while he fished, and he did not like talking God at all. His wife Bernice was well. He loved God cautiously. He did not know how long this love would last. Harvard and Melanie were married by Peden on the pleasure barge. Their marriage was that of pals after a fight and long silence. It had become too late in time for fights, and often even memories. They clung. (336) Even conceding Northrop Frye’s observation that the society emerging at the end of comedy is based on ideals that are seldom defined or formulated because definition and formulation belong to the order that has been overcome,16 the opacity of the novel’s conclusion presents a formal problem. In attempting to come to terms

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with the comedic space that emerges, I argue that it offers no terms—more specifically, that the recovery of credible space depends on the banishment of speech, which has all along been associated with performers such as Facetto, whom everyone agrees is “another fraud of vocality like Bill Clinton” (211). (Despite being rejected by Melanie for his “breathy dramatic pauses” and for treating the “community’s nightmare . . . as if it were some trivial dramatic work that had floated past a theater workshop he was in” (335), Facetto performs one useful service before removing to a “far, far state”: He demands that his deputy “make [Mortimer] quit talking” [336].) I want, in other words, to read a kind of allegory into Mortimer’s confinement in Parchman Prison, “where he would not stop talking” (336), and the physical contact (“[they] drew closer together,” “they clung”) that defines the novel’s conclusion, which, in evacuating both speech and the intense, grounded pleasures characteristic of comedy, signals a kind of empty repetition or simulation of comedic form deployed against the regime of the simulacrum. Asceticism and reticence countervail the pathologies of pleasure and speech. Hannah’s critique of speech, then, parallels his broader critique of representations that substitute theme for space, nostalgia for history, stereotype for neighborliness, pornography for reciprocal sexual pleasure. In The Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukács describes the novel’s world as a bifurcated one in which “the world of deeds separates itself from men and, because of this independence, becomes hollow and incapable of absorbing the true meaning of deed in itself, incapable of becoming a symbol through deeds and dissolving them in turn into symbols.” According to Lukács, the novel registers this loss by producing a “dissonance special to the novel, the refusal of the immanence of being to enter into empirical life.”17 In order to account for Hannah’s critique of speech—the narrative’s preference, as Max puts it, for “acts, not chats” (283)—we must first understand that, just as the novel’s virtual economy intensifies Lukácsian reification, so its radical division of deeds and symbols (“acts and chats”) amplifies Lukácsian dissonance to deafening postmodern levels. Because the sum total of the novel’s givens preclude incarnation— whether understood as the reciprocal absorption of deed and symbol, the entrance of immanence into empirical life, or the Word made flesh—redemption (or more broadly, the formal resolution of the narrative’s oppressive double-bind) can proceed only as hypothesis and contingency. In this effort, animals and music help. Egan concludes his jeremiad with an injunction to “Shut up! Shut up! And talk to the animals. They have soul, they have art. / Shut up and live with your gorgeous neighbors!” (149). Despite the paradox— it is a call for silence uttered aloud, just as Egan elsewhere denounces books (“a very mortal sin . . . . not wrote by the Christly. . . . a sign of present day hell” [72])

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in a book—it is sound advice. As throughout Hannah’s fiction, Yonder Stands Your Orphan imagines animals as humanity’s radical Other commodified for inhuman ends: as Egan says, “they use a language we can’t understand, so we kill them, tear them apart, even sell their parts for aphrodisiacs” (147). Animals inhabit, they do not speak: the relation is causal. The “only prophets” available (158), Ulrich and Carl Bob Feeney, speak for their silence: “They did not humanize animals. . . . They wanted to learn their language, and how indeed they had kept going despite depression, despair, even suicide” (158). Dogs not only endure, they prevail, living “huge lives before they die” (160), experiencing “ecstasy over the day” and “oneness with the infinite” (146). As Ulrich says, dogs “don’t talk because they don’t need speech. . . . Dogs are in space and time” (159–60).18 Baudrillard suggests the logic behind this formulation, observing that “in a universe of increasing speech, of the constraint to confess and to speak, only [animals] remain mute, and for this reason, they seem to retreat far from us. But it is what makes us intimate with them. . . . [I]n a world assembled under the hegemony of signs and discourse, their silence weighs more and more heavily on our organization of meaning.”19 The life of dogs thus inverts precisely the life of humans, colonized by speech, exiled from space and time, and distinctly suicidal. At the same time, the lives of animals represent a pragmatic impasse within the social field of the novel. If animals were, as Egan says, “already there” in the Garden of Eden, the world of the novel is radically postlapsarian; if animals “are Christ every day” (146), then their incarnation remains inaccessible per se. At best, animals offer an example of silence, pleasure, and endurance that might, in some deeply refracted or hypothetical way, enable the practice of living with one’s neighbors. A parallel and equally “impractical” speechlessness is available in music—at least the sort performed by Mimi Suarez and, more centrally, the five “dark black” musicians at the church Raymond purchases. Their music, which they “had no interest in recording or selling,” translates as “Christ, we are your throat” (284); Christ, in turn, cannot say anything. Again, the language of incarnation is marked by the banishment of language, almost as if, to use Lukács’s formulation, immanence of being can enter empirical life only as an exquisite hypothesis. Animals and music, then, offer cognate instances of redemption as pure form—redemption, that is, that cannot embody “content” lest it become transformed, through some inevitable momentum, into yet another vehicle of abject disembodiment. This is why the church, which Hannah has identified as the “only real hero” of the novel (Interview 262), must be a church without firm belief (“the Church of Open Doors, open for the lost and dead of all causes” [309]), just as the pleasure barge—the novel’s other candidate as a credible, authentic social space—erupts into discord

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when Melanie Wooten interrupts its silent harmonies with a talky poem (180–82). As Egan suggests, credible space is contingent on “shutting up.” This, in turn, renders the narrative relatively silent on the community that resists or at least survives the trend of culture and its various maladies of representation. The broad pattern of contingent redemption—or, alternatively, incarnation as pure form—is repeated at the level of the individual: “Max Raymond suddenly knew his vision would come at the end of his life and not a moment before. He was nearly blinded by the realization that he was a nuisance to both God and man. He repented. He would act. He felt expendable to a higher power and this was good. He was resigned but in no way sad” (311). It is no coincidence that Raymond is on the receiving end of this deferred vision. Effectively orphaned by his mother, who prefers to attend to the “heathen orphans of the world” (89), Raymond becomes a saxophonist “who had somehow gotten good through pure want” (171). But his music is impure: a sonic ironist to his wife’s pure music, playing “against her, mocking or blaming her for her gifts” (35), he is later rejected by the black musicians who are Christ’s throat. Acutely attuned to the evil disembodied in Man Mortimer, he is unable to resist it. Raymond is stylistically consonant with the novel and the culture it describes, a consonance that frames his repentance in a distinctive way, since what we recognize there is a curiously resigned and deflated version of what Flannery O’Connor once termed the “action of Grace in a territory inhabited largely by the devil.” Lacking any trace of the sublime, the language of redemption here signals the deferral of the pure, incarnated word, as if language itself cannot embody incarnation. Earlier, Raymond has explicitly named this desire in his poem: These claims, What the Lord Wants Me to Do, Greek, Greek to me. I would like straight Aramaic right from His lips. ... Or just show up, why don’t You? (243–44) He gets, however, neither Christ nor His Word. His redemption is not epiphanic, but contingent; as a matter of the future conditional tense (“He would act”), it’s still Greek to him. For this reason, redemptive acts—“What the Lord Wants Me to Do”—remain undefined except in the sense Raymond has recognized earlier in meditating on Christian militants who “cannot be Christian but are Christ’s allies,” who lack “visions” but war against “ambiguous fiends through history” (179). In this boundary defense—albeit one sanctioned by Christ—lies the narrative’s

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deep spatial logic. Revising O’Connor, we might say that the action of grace in a territory inhabited largely by the devil is simply to banish the devil. For Yonder Stands Your Orphan is, at its core, the book of Man Mortimer, “the demon itself” (328),20 and his expulsion, accomplished not through the law but through the “town’s certainty that he was the killer [of Penny Ten Hoor]” (336), leaves the town cleansed, but inarticulate and imaginable only in terms of shared space. In an act of social hygiene roughly parallel to Mortimer’s incarceration, the orphan’s camp, thematically coherent to the point of insanity, has been “razed to the ground” (4). What remains is not a reimagined community—that is, a system in which speech and practice derive from, and in turn reproduce, some social archive—but a retreat. The law is not reconstituted as part of some utopian gesture but banished (in the form of Facetto) as just another scene of empty performance. Coded territoriality, insofar as it involves the collective regulation of desire, remains inaccessible because it has been all along so uniformly undesirable. No families remain, only neighbors and partners. For the exhausted survivors, the narrative’s utopian energies are dissipated lest the paradox of utopianism itself (as simultaneously “good place” and “no place”) dissolve the only place they have left. In the epilogue’s rather grim production of locality lies, finally, Hannah’s formal solution to the postmodern assault narrative. In his reading of Lukács and the novel’s “form problem,” Jameson identifies “the brute fact of contingency” as the “content” that “a modernist aesthetics seeks to burn away, like slag, in order that some ‘pure’ work or form can emerge from the process.”21 Yonder Stands Your Orphan inverts the scenario precisely: it is purity that cannot be assimilated in the novel’s radically contingent domain, one dominated by cultural noise against which “music” can be posited only as an “exquisite hypothesis” and against which only silence can be brought to bear as a practical measure. This is not to fault the novel for failing to provide an adequate resolution, but rather to indicate the conditions in which it affords us, as Roland Barthes says in another context, a “dizzy spectacle of praxis without sanction . . . . a Mosaic glance at the Promised Land of the real.”22 In an interview, Hannah describes being “shocked” and “staggered” by the novel’s “darkness,” but also “struck” by the perseverance and endurance of his survivors: “They just keep creeping on, keep fishing, keep having their pleasure barges.”23 These, of course, are acts, but profoundly limited ones. Pleasure on these terms acts more directly as an index of an ascetic space that has, by some minor miracle, been kept intact from the world that surrounds the fragile borders of Eagle Lake, a world in which desire is rigorously embedded in an economy of artificial gratification and monstrous simulation, a world, finally, in which reality homesickness offers no cure.24 In a world

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condemned to mimicry, Hannah suggests, speaking is decomposition; in a world wherein we cannot speak, we must be silent. l In its desire to arrive at a world beyond the pathologies of representation, Yonder Stands Your Orphan is left enervated, its utopian energies dissipated. Eagle Lake survives as an enclave of contingency: post-contractual, post-symbolic, post-familial, post-apocalyptic. But survive it does, as a space protected from a world in which desire circulates monstrously and relentlessly as pornography. Although Josephine Humphreys parallels Hannah in her exploration of what we have called postfamilial culture, her orientation toward desire is altogether different: asceticism is not a narrative solution but an obstacle to be surmounted. If the spatial narrative of Yonder Stands Your Orphan is one of contraction, its counterpart in Humphreys is a story of expansion as desire breaks down old spaces and presses toward new ones. In turning, then, to Humphreys, I want to begin with two metaphors that help describe this shift: the breakdown of family and the fracturing of space. Both metaphors tell us that something is broken, although the breakage is different. The family breaks down as a machine does: it no longer works, functions, produces— whatever it is that machines, categorically, do. Space breaks differently. Its breakage is of a whole—a whole pot, a whole bone, a whole pane of glass. What once was total and coherent is now diminished into its separate, formerly constitutive parts; now they are fragments. There is a loss of functionality here, too, but it is deeply implicit: space does come before us (normally) as a machine. I begin with these metaphors because they are fundamental to the late southern terrain mapped by Humphreys in her second novel, Rich in Love (1987). In the remainder of this chapter, I want to trace a third kind of breakage that mediates the breakdown of family and the fracturing of space by reorienting them as creative, productive forms of destruction. Surely no contemporary southern writer is so compelled as Humphreys by the intersection of family and space—that is, by that ambiguous domain we usually call “home,” which locates the family in a house, a neighborhood, a landscape, a city, a region, a nation. (Precisely where one’s “home” ends is never quite clear.) Humphreys’s homes are never quite intact; they are either falling apart, fracturing, or they have already done so, and this breakdown (or breakage) typically acquires a spatial component—that is, it is not merely a family but a space or set of concentric spaces that is at stake. To put the matter this way, however, is to suggest the priority of family to space—treating space, in effect, as a kind of objective correlative to the more fundamental family drama—in a way that may ultimately dis-

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tort what Humphreys is doing. Instead, I want to preserve the spatial ambiguity in words like “home” in an effort to interrogate more broadly Humphreys’s fictions of location. As Jan Norby Gretlund says, “Humphreys describes a place in detail because she writes about human beings, and to understand and define them, it is essential in her aesthetics of place to locate them.”25 But where Gretlund understands place’s “enduring identity” to precede the individual subject, I want to argue that place is, as Humphreys depicts it, an explicit fiction: a matter of contingency, of selection, of consumption, and of differentiated psychological investment typically situated in a narrative flow of causes and effects. More precisely, place is neither wholly determinative nor wholly constructed, neither a matter of where you are (objectively speaking) nor of where you imagine yourself to be, but instead lies, as it were, in the more fluid terrains of the late South. In attempting to map this middle ground, I begin with a metaphor offered by Rich in Love’s narrator, Lucille Odom: the habitat. By habitat, I mean to indicate a set of spatially grounded practices and routines that have become literally naturalized. But in Rich in Love, the habitat is always under threat. Lucille begins her story this way: “On an afternoon two years ago my life veered from its day-in day-out course and became for a short while the kind of life that can be told as a story— that is, one in which events appear to have meaning. Before, there had been nothing worth telling the world. We had our irregularities; but every family has something or other out of whack. . . . But nothing about us was story material.”26 The breakdown of the family’s normality—the swerve from irregularities that are only quotidian—initiates narrative itself; we might say that this breakdown requires narrative as a means of restoring functionality coded as reality. Lucille’s fall into narrative symptomizes her recursive retreat to reality—and her corresponding aversion to “the fake”—as a mode of boundary defense. Let me state the matter provocatively: Lucille is, as the novel opens, a reality fetishist. She imagines herself living in a real house, not a fake house. She imagines herself as living in a real place, not a fake place; the “real town” of Mt. Pleasant, she observes, “huddled secretly behind [the] development” that has erupted, volcano-like, from the city of Charleston (11– 12). She imagines herself living in a real family, “a hermit family [that] nothing could touch,” not one of the numerous American families “blowing apart” under the strain of “outside interests” (15). Lucille’s core scenario—the most fundamental script through which she organizes everyday experience—is one of a threatened habitat. She is, she says, a “patriot in the deep meaning of the word, which entails something more complex than loyalty to the U.S.A. Olympic team. It means loving the place as if it were your home, as if you were an animal and it your habitat” (159). That habitat serves Lucille as an imagined relation to space is significant,

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since in this capacity habitat possesses two salient characteristics. First, a habitat is natural, not constructed; this is how it obtains reality. Second, a habitat—as we all know from watching nature shows—is susceptible to invasion and destruction. To say “threatened habitat” is to use one word too many. This is why, for Lucille, real estate development is always a sinister development; why, as we shall see momentarily, redecorating is a crime; and why, most significantly, her mother’s leaving the family is a betrayal. Lucille’s coding of place as habitat determines, among other things, her self-defining character trait, vigilance. “Let the world do its worst,” she says, “Lucille Odom was ready” (6), the operative assumptions being that the world will and that vigilance will help. Already, Lucille has noted the “carcasses” of animals who “had not yet adjusted to the new system” of development in which the orderly “zones of country, town, and city” have become “jumbled, haphazard as a frontier settlement” (2–3). Vigilance will protect her from becoming roadkill on the new frontier. Except that it won’t, not least because the new frontier, unlike the old one, is the late southern frontier of Builderamas, tourism, and simulacra. As Michael Kreyling puts it, in “Humphreys’s South there is no simultaneity of real and replica [since] nothing but simulacra are available in the search for meaning.” Although I fully agree with this assessment, I depart from Kreyling’s insistence that Lucille inhabits a privileged place in the regime of the simulacrum, either as a natural habitat that she negotiates effortlessly while the men around her flounder, or as a degraded space to which she remains impervious, her feet planted firmly on the ground of the real. Rich in Love offers, I want to argue, a kind of postmodern quixoticism in which reality and the simulacrum are reversed. If Don Quixote attempts to impose fantasy on reality—to project a giant on what we know to be a windmill— Rich in Love offers the possibility that the most fantastic, quixotic quest may be for reality itself. If Kreyling is correct in asserting that “Humphreys through Lucille maintains that self-definition in the postsouthern world takes place in a hall of mirrors, not in a fixed system,” it is equally true that Lucille must learn to navigate that hall of mirrors.27 The cultural terrain of the late South is not her natural habitat. Where, initially, her naive commitment to the real and the authentic trap her within the inflexible spaces of the enclave and the habitat, she learns, as the novel progresses, to navigate a world of tourism, redecorating, development, consumption, and improvisation—a world, cumulatively, of subjunctive spaces “between what’s real and what’s not.” To put the matter this way, however, is to impose a paradigm of “character growth”—let us call it the innocence-to-experience paradigm—that is, as I hope to show, curiously complicated by the historical rupture that it purports to describe, a historical shift that, as Žižek puts it, “does not

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simply designate the ‘regressive’ loss (or ‘progressive’ gain) of something, but a shift in the very grid which enables us to measure losses and gains.”28 Through Lucille, I argue, Humphreys imagines a discontinuous grid of breakage, a fundamental reorientation of losses and gains. l Before turning to the specific practices by which Lucille imagines herself to guard her threatened habitat, I want to turn briefly to Humphreys’s first novel, Dreams of Sleep, and the figure of Will Reese. Like Lucille, Will recurs to boundary defense as a mode of identity, although his vigilance differs significantly from Lucille’s. Deployed against fakery, against development (and, more generally, real estate as a mode of defining space), and against (most of all) the Ohioans and Atlantans (a distinction, he would say, without a difference) who threaten the habitat in which his identity is invested, Will’s vigilance is similarly imbricated in a family drama. Will’s desire to replicate his father, and his corresponding hostility toward his mother, acquire strict analogues in spaces large and small. At the small end of the scale is Will’s medical office, which he tries to model on his father’s, only to find himself thwarted by his receptionist and lover, Claire Thibeaux, who makes Will install air-conditioning for the comfort of his patients.29 Claire’s kitchen, conversely, is desirable because it “is like the good old kitchens, not the new magazine kitchens. . . . Now a kitchen isn’t good for more than five years, the styles change” (113–14). This, too, recurs to the family drama, since the kitchen of Will’s childhood never changed, while his mother’s new kitchen “is almond, with an island” that houses all the latest appliances (114). The new, diminished kitchen is located in the “fake plantation house” of Duncan Nesmith, Marcella’s new husband, an Ohioan with all the requisite desires: “Ohioans love what they think is the South. Boiled shrimp, debutantes, the Civil War,—they’re gaga over every bit of it, fueling the tourist industry in Charleston and Savannah and New Orleans and every town that has a plaque or monument” (47). At the broadest level, Will scripts his father’s replacement by Duncan as a story of southern decline. “The New South,” Will believes, is “Ohio warmed over. . . . Land that Will’s father used to measure, marsh and mud flat, woods, coast, swamp, is falling to Duncan Nesmith to be filled or cut over, skinned of all real growth, and then landscaped. With plants that didn’t even grow here in Edmund’s lifetime” (47–48). Will casts the traumatic replacement of the father-surveyor by the usurper-developer as a colonial drama, “as if the South were some non-English-speaking banana republic crying for development in the

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image of Ohio” (47). What becomes clear, however, is that Ohio is the cipher for Duncan, not the other way around. Dreams of Sleep insists that Will’s psychological investment in the family drama drives his valuation of space. Indeed, Edmund’s death initiates an especially arbitrary geography: “After his father died, Will decided that North Carolina was a better place than South Carolina. North Carolina was dignified and masculine, intelligent. . . . South Carolina after Edmund’s death seemed fat and flushed, oppressive” (38). The death of the father, twice cited as casual agent, drives this imagined geography, just as Duncan’s marriage to Marcella—which upsets the family, “meaning Will, the upset family” (143)—organizes for Will the destruction of the southern real. For Will will only vacation at Sea Island, “because it is old, not one of the new ones,” the new ones being ruined by “Interlopers. Turning our real places into artificial places” (75). Even at Sea Island, Will is thwarted by the “fake place” (a swimming pool), and so must seek out historical “real places” such as Bloody Marsh and Fort Frederica, where earlier territorialities were settled and successfully defended against invaders (76). Will’s wife Alice believes that “it is men to whom home means a certain place, a territory marked and held” (185), and her husband offers compelling evidence. (By contrast, she “could leave home in an instant, as most women could, and make a new one somewhere else” [185]). Surveying a house that has been broken into apartments, Will wonders, “Once this whole house was the home of one family. Is this how things fall apart, then? Not in sudden collapse, but by slow fragmentation. Houses turn into apartments, estates into subdivisions. We can’t sustain the things we used to sustain: dynasties, clans, big families; we can’t even maintain their monuments” (112). By “we,” Will means southerners, but he actually means himself, and he’s doing a poor job of maintaining his family of four. Southerners—Charlestonians, in fact—are lining up behind Duncan’s latest venture, a pirate “theme park” that, according to Will, “no true son of this city would back [emphasis in original]” (181–82). As his threatened habitat threatens to become a habitat of one, Will may be, according to his own logic, the only true son of this city left. In this excessive (although uncannily apt) metaphor, we observe neurosis driving a defense of the true Charleston and the real South. Put another way, we observe, if not an authorial endorsement of the South’s Disneyfication, a systematic decoding of Will’s authenticity fetish.30 l If Will Reese points us toward a specifically masculine mode of territorial defense, the case of Lucille Odom suggests that the pattern is not strictly gendered. While Lucille is, indisputably, a more attractive character than Will, their similarities

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justify a comparative reading of their attitudes toward shifting terrains. One point of overlap (and also deviation) involves the scenario of ecological disaster. Whereas Will strategically plots the empty aquifer (borrowed from Newsweek magazine) as part of his threatened habitat, Lucille projects global warming (borrowed from a study reported in the local paper) as part of hers: “Inundation would be gradual, inches per year, but inevitable, unless everyone in the world immediately stopped burning coal, using fertilizer, and spraying aerosol deodorant. Fat chance, I said to myself. So every time I looked at my own yard, every time I rode the bicycle, I saw not the good old world I had known forever, but a world it was nearly time to say good-bye to. Beauty doubled and tripled around me. The place was doomed” (8). In contrast to Will’s story of cultural decline organized around development—real estate’s slow fragmentation—Lucille’s is relatively disorganized: space seems equally (or discontinuously) threatened by climate change, real estate, tourism, decorating, and a range of social dysfunction that she categorically ascribes to “geographical restlessness” (14). Still, we recognize a more explicit and sustained ecological bent to Lucille’s relation to space, such that that “habitat” is more appropriate, strictly speaking, for her than for Will. If Will defends the South, Lucille defends the view. Consequently, her habitat is more thoroughly aestheticized, as in the passage above, which offers global warming as the mother of beauty, enabling in this capacity Lucille’s nostalgia for the present. Eventually Lucille might say, with Thoreau, “Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly”; all along she avoids getting her “fingers burned by actual possession.” Will, conversely, is invested in property as controlled space. Still, Lucille’s view radiates initially from a particular home, and she deploys her early views as a bulwark against the kind of contingency Thoreau describes. Contemplating her “favorite view” early in the novel, Lucille imagines it as a scene of restoration: “A view like that is a privilege, I told myself, and I began to get back the old feeling that I once had, the feeling that my place was special, my family was special, I myself was perhaps also, in some tiny way, special; and therefore my troubles would soon be over. The present discombobulation was temporary, maybe even some sort of test to see if we were the tough and virtuous family I had always said we were” (31–32). Even here, the ligatures between space and family are looser than with Will; Lucille has more room to maneuver, conceptually speaking. Her conservatism is more flexible than Will’s, and certainly less embedded in power relations, functioning at times as a kind of neutral preservationism. But preservationism has for Lucille social consequences in the things she defends, which range from a view “endangered” by a “condo complex, built in a Middle Eastern style” (132) to the “virtuous family” she desires to preserve. For Lucille, desirable space is, invariably, a habitat, an ecosystem, and this logic

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requires her to understand environments as either natural or built: all natural environments are real; all built environments are threatening. But this division produces excessive slippage, since, for one thing, Lucille must actively maintain her habitat through habits of viewing. She rides a bike, she says, because “I could form a good idea of where I was, whereas in a car I couldn’t quite get the feel of a place except as a sort of television show sliding flat past the window, dull as advertising” (2). A pane of glass transforms reality into virtual reality, orientation into disorientation. For another, many of Lucille’s desirable spaces are built, requiring her to divide artificially the house-as-habitat from more improvised dwellings. She declares the Poole’s house beyond the pale precisely because it is improvised. Although Mr. Poole collects things that he “believed sincerely . . . were valuable” (72), his accumulation of “junk”—recuperated as “art” by this “Root Man for God” (74)—occasions Lucille’s opinion that “even one poor man is capable of plenty of destruction” (72). For her part, Lucille fills her house with antiques and near-antiques because, as she says, “Why buy a regular chair, when you can get one with history behind it?” (168). Her house, which “had not changed much over the century,” has undergone some renovations. “Still,” Lucille continues, it was a house with integrity, not the kind of house you would want to modernize with skylights or a deck and hot tub. At one time Mother had gotten an architect in to ask him how she could “lighten up the rooms somehow,” and he came back with sketches totally disfiguring the house, insulating and sheet-rocking, painting everything white, glassing in the porches, tiling the bathroom. . . . I said it would be a crime to paint these walls. They were supposed to be dark, how could she think of painting them? . . . “But it would be the same house, Lulu,” she said, smoothing my hair, “only spruced up a bit.” ... I looked at the drawings. “That is a completely different house,” I said, pointing toward the floor. “I could never live in that house.” She realized that I was right, that remodeling would be a crime. (63) In this scenario, Lucille imagines the built environment as habitat, transforming her home, as David Harvey observes of a pervasive postmodern practice, “into a private museum to guard against the ravages of time-space compression.”31 To redecorate, to introduce any new thing, would be to violate the naturalized criteria of the museum, which is simultaneously the family space. But Lucille’s insistence

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on maintaining the integrity of her house only defers conflict with her mother. Far from agreeing with Lucille that remodeling is a crime, Helen is merely acquiescing. Earlier, she has broken down sobbing over the “creeping clutter” that has invaded her home. When her husband Warren suggests that they simply throw some it away, Lucille objects strenuously; what appears to her mother as “bric-abrac” has, for Lucille, “real historical value” (60). “I didn’t think,” she says, “as my mother did, of stacks and stacks of useless, chipped, cracking, unmatched dinnerware. I thought of artifacts” (61). Later in the novel, when Lucille angrily confronts her mother over her “betrayal” of the family, Helen explains her decision using the language of redecorating: I bet half the cases of clinical depression in women are caused by House Beautiful. I’d read it and say, hey, I can make those slipcovers. . . . Then when I got them on the chairs, they were all wrong, didn’t look like anything I’d envisioned, because there was so much I hadn’t taken into account—all the other things in the room, the bureaus and tables and sofas, the geometric pattern in the rug, the flowers in the curtains. My slipcovers got swallowed up. Now I see that the secret is to start with an empty room. Your father and I bought that house furnished, and it just attracted more and more junk, all those so-called antiques.” She looked at me. “Oh, I didn’t mean that your things are junk, I meant—everything taken together.” (208–9) For Helen, the problem is not House Beautiful and its slipcovers, but the house that swallows the slipcovers, thereby thwarting House Beautiful’s expressive possibilities. Whereas for Lucille a “house with integrity,” full of artifacts and historical chairs, grounds identity in space, her mother experiences the same space as an assault on identity. She desires, as she says, to “get away from the whole package, the house, everything. The family” (210). Unlike Lucille, who desires as much furniture, as much authenticity, as much history as she can get, her mother wants an empty room of her own. Decorating, in short, is not merely decorative; window treatments are not merely window dressing. But lest we cast Helen as feminist heroine to Lucille’s stodgy spokesperson for the traditional home, we should note that there are costs here as well. When Lucille considers unburdening herself to her mother regarding her love for Billy, she catches herself just in time, having noted Helen’s “eyes wander, the way a person’s eyes wander when they are not seriously listening to you. Her eyes left my face and went, for a split second, to her yellow curtains” (211).

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My concern is to privilege neither Lucille’s preservationism nor Helen’s empty room aesthetic, but to recognize that both decorating styles constitute sutures between spaces, families, and identities. Both styles are equally rigid: Lucille’s has no place for the new, Helen’s no place for the old. But as the novel comes to a close, a third, more flexible option emerges. Lucille’s house has been sold to a new family and her attitude toward it has changed: “The place looks eligible for a feature article in Southern Living, and I am as happy for it as I would be for a friend who has met with sudden success after hard times; its good fortune relieves me. We sold it furnished, and I worried briefly about the fate of my pie safe and barber chair and bed. . . . Luckily the lady of the house remodeled in the country look, with calico curtains and straw brooms and stuffed-cat door-stops, and my furniture fit right in. And though I once believed I could not live without that house, the ease with which I gave it up was almost frightening” (260). The swerve that permits Lucille’s acceptance of leaving her habitat should not be underestimated, since what Lucille “once believed” (and here reiterates) has been established to the point of redundancy. Perhaps even more surprising is Lucille’s acceptance of the pastiche: of stuffed-cat doorstops and, more broadly, “the country look” as an optional (and therefore disposable) style that displaces or subsumes the authenticity and integrity of her home. It is not that the place has become neutral or dead to her—it’s still a “friend,” and a friend, moreover, with the “good fortune” to be eligible for Southern Living. But what does such eligibility entail? An article in the April 2000 issue of that magazine negotiates precisely the problem Lucille has framed. The article describes the Aberdeen Pilgrimage, a seasonal tour of plantation homes, as a “reality check pilgrimage.” Repeatedly juxtaposing old and new—antiques and swimming pools, period décor and modern kitchens—the article insists that these “are not just showplaces, but real homes,” “real, lived-in houses.” Severing reality and authenticity, Southern Living privileges reality as deriving from present modes of habitation, not from the preservation of the past.32 Even if the article’s somewhat anxious attitude toward the real—an anxiety pervasive in the magazine, which constantly frets about the reality of its glossy South—is conspicuously absent in Lucille’s contemplation of a similar house in which old and new, the authentic and the stylized, are juxtaposed, it is somehow fitting that Southern Living provides a congenial (if hypothetical) domain for the synthetic décor of what has become, for Lucille, the “Old House” (260), a décor with room for both Lucille’s historical chairs and her mother’s House Beautiful slipcovers. In short, Southern Living provides an implicit logic by which redecorating might be decriminalized. At the same time, it is crucial to recognize that the problem of the real resists neat conceptual solutions; it is as fluid

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and unstable at the conclusion of Rich in Love as it is in the pages of Southern Living. Crucially, however, reality is severed from the authenticity of the natural habitat as Humphreys’s narrative concludes by describing persons gravitating toward new spaces—including the “replica of [Mother’s] original dream house” where Lucille currently lives (260)—even as Lucille observes how “we are all gravitating back into family lives of one sort and another” (260). l To understand the implications of Lucille’s revision of the real, we shall need to backtrack a bit to analyze a paradox underlying Lucille’s initial orientation toward reality. The paradox is this: on the one hand, Lucille understands reality as inherent in the surfaces that surround her and to which she has direct, unmediated access; on the other, she understands reality to exist beneath surfaces, waiting to be uncovered. And so, while her family, town, and views are real because they are self-evident components of her habitat, Lucille simultaneously possesses, like Thoreau, an instinct for burrowing. Reality, then, is aligned with both habitat (what is around her) and treasure (what she must dig for). Most of Lucille’s treasures are historical or linguistic. Beneath, for example, the “red herrings” of the history books, the “secrets of life” lie “hidden” in the “dusty corners of human history” (46). Beneath the linguistic clutter of common speech lie Latin roots and real meanings waiting to be dug out. “Passion,” she relates in a typical example, “means suffering, if you go back to Latin, which I often do when I want to know what a word really means” (19). This instinct has ambivalent consequences: Lucille is, in many ways, an especially acute observer with a mind, as her sister Rae reports, like a steel trap. But Lucille misses a lot, too: that her mother is unhappy in her marriage; that her father has been dating Vera Oxendine, and wishes to continue to do so; that her sister has been visiting her mother; that her mother has been “hiding,” like Poe’s purloined letter, in plain sight. And whereas Poe’s “Gold Bug,” set not too far away from Rich in Love, describes how decoding and detective work lead to a very real buried treasure, Lucille finds that getting to the bottom of things places her head, at times, in the sand. The paradox we have noted resolves itself when we recognize that Lucille’s deployment of surface and depth serve her as roughly equivalent fictions of location. As Shelley Jackson observes, “Lucille wants words to explain and to order things. In language, Lucille looks for stability and for the explicable.”33 Lucille uses her etymology of passion, for example, to indicate the threat it poses to marriage, which “needs the opposite—steady comfort” (19); her “theory” is that the “human heart

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needs to be confined” (15). Where history is concerned, a similar logic obtains in which the preservation of historical fact (or artifact) serves a broader agenda of preservation and location. Lucille makes no distinction between public history and personal history, since the practice of each must be meticulous: “So much gets lost! Historians better buckle down, I thought, and individuals keep closer track of their own private history. It can be forgotten so easily, especially if a person’s memory isn’t efficient” (51). Lucille buckles down, to become, in effect, her own historiographer. But just as when she becomes the curator of her own house, this generates the potential for a new problematic of the real to emerge, since living in a biography (or a museum) introduces a tension between the ordinary, default space of the habitat and the differentiated, actively maintained spaces in which reality circulates uneasily. Especially since the habitat has broken down from the inside, as it does when Helen leaves the fortification of the Odom home, Lucille gravitates toward the condition of the tourist. It is therefore not surprising that when Lucille encounters real tourists, reality itself begins to break down. Late in the novel, she confronts a tour bus in Charleston: The smell of bus fuel had become the dominant smell of the city. I had an urge to commandeer the bus and take the tourists on a different kind of tour, run them up Highway 17 to the new Builderama, Osceola Pointe, Palmetto Villas, Rhody’s house, Fishbone’s. I’d roll down all the windows of the bus and let people hang their heads out and really see something worth seeing, the transformation of the world. “Look what’s happening,” I’d say into the microphone. I tried to keep my eyes on their faces as they climbed down off the bus, but all the faces had a deadly sameness that made it hard to look one in the eyes. I could tell what the trouble was: they had been to Epcot. After Epcot, Charleston is hardly worth seeing; no dinosaurs are going to lunge at you on the Battery, no music comes out of the azaleas. After Epcot, a real place is boring. There’s something very thrilling about the fake. (186) The passage is dizzying for several reasons, not least of which is Lucille’s apparently abrupt revision of the relationship between Charleston and the real. At first, the tourists appear trapped in their virtual consumption of Charleston: wake up and see reality, Lucille wants to say to them. “Look what’s happening” seems to be a call to reality, and yet the reality to which Lucille points is the destruction of reality as she knows it. In the context of the list that immediately precedes it, the “transfor-

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mation of the world” is a transformation of ruined views and invaded habitats. The presumably global Builderama threatens Mom and Pop (here called “Mr. Powell’s” [10]); Palmetto Villas is a resort whose name, in all likelihood, is a “memoria[l] to what had been bulldozed into oblivion” (6); Rhody’s house, as we have seen, constitutes the scene of the poor man’s destruction. Osceola Pointe is a real estate “boondoggle” which leads Lucille to conclude that “what we had to look out for was men in packs, making messes the world could not stomach. Building, spraying, burning. Something deep and ungovernable as hunger was driving those men. . . . [D]amage was being done, and nobody seemed to notice” (77). Lucille worries that her father is one of these men. Whereas the decoration of private space differentiates Lucille from her mother, the development of public space differentiates her from her father, a demolition expert who “could claim partial credit for the new look of the cities he loved. Columbia, Charlotte, Atlanta, Charleston. He had helped clear the way for all their downtown [buildings that] . . . were proof that the Southeast had become nothing to be ashamed of” (81–82). Warren has no truck with the nostalgia industry. “There are some people,” he tells Lucille, “who remember their old main street fondly. All these movies now put you back in time, there’s a lot of nostalgia these days, but I’ll tell you: I hated that street, and I hate the memory of it” (93). For Warren, such sites of deprivation and “hard scrabbling” are deserving of demolition.34 Lucille can explain Charleston’s material prosperity only as a sinister development: drug money has arrived in town (177). Again, the ligatures of space and identity become clear; what the child of poverty values, the child of privilege distrusts. And again, we return to the deep paradox of nostalgia, which depends on the flexible accumulation and flow of capital that threaten the very objects and spaces wherein it resides. But if the passage above begins with the scenario of the habitat threatened by men in packs, it ends with an altogether different threat posed by the simulacrum and Jameson’s EPCOT syndrome. (Indeed, Jameson’s assertion that global Disney “will redo your own native architecture for you more exactly than you can do it for yourself” is especially resonant in Charleston, where new buildings, Lucille explains, “did a good job of imitating the old ones; I could not always tell which ones had been built in 1800 and which ones in 1985” [177].) Even so, Lucille opposes Charleston (as a “real place”) to EPCOT-style fakery, an as-yet-unsimulated space that is “boring” to tourists precisely because it is real. For this reason, it is an overt violation of Lucille’s reality principle that she becomes a tourist, paying her $15 to join the tour with Rhody and consume, as the tour’s brochure puts it, “historic downtown Charleston, where descendants of the original lowcountry planters preserve the traditions of their forefathers” (195). If the cultural logic of late

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capitalism, as Stephen Connor says, intensifies a desire for origin even as erotic lack, the tour’s egregiously canned atavism might well threaten Lucille’s more sophisticated preservationist tendencies. Certainly the “reality” of Charleston under these conditions bespeaks a desirable absence and not a tangible presence. Lucille’s tour is, quite literally, disorienting, and not only from the beer that makes her “so dizzy” (197). (At home, Lucille drinks only nonalcoholic beer.) The more crucial, and finally more enabling, disorientation comes from the new perspective she obtains on what had been a habituated space: “I liked touring my own city. It was a new perspective” (196). New perspectives begin to multiply; reality begins to deteriorate under disorienting pressures. If what’s real is the destruction of reality, then Lucille will have to find someplace else to live. What’s more, she may want to, since “the fake” (as she understands it) generates the very thrills that, to this point, she has carefully censored. l Lucille’s initial relation to space can be framed as a paradox: she desires spaces evacuated of desire, which she understands to compromise both families and habitats. Passion threatens marriage, while its alternative, “steady comfort,” preserves it. On this point, Lucille is seconded by her father, who perceives “too much sex” between Rae and Billy. “Excess of desire,” he says, “can unbalance a marriage” (86). Similarly, “something deep and ungovernable as hunger” drives the men in packs who threaten Lucille’s views. Lucille’s distrust of appetite is quite literal; the “comfort of food,” she says, is “false comfort” (127), while “real comfort, as the Romans knew, is fortification” (127). As a consumer, Lucille is “easily baffled by the array of goods” and “overstimulated in malls” (4). Able to imagine “ethics outweighed by desire,” she tells Billy how, on one occasion, they were: “I saw a lipstick display and this color, apricot frost, struck me like thunder. I had to have it immediately, without going through the usual channels. It was a physical feeling. So I stole it” (157). The sexual overtones of kleptomania foreshadow Lucille’s sexual desire for Billy, which likewise outweighs ethics and avoids the usual channels. Similarly, a crucial moment of foreplay in their evolving relationship takes place at a mall— or rather its replacement, the built environment of the plazas, “smaller and emotional places designed to make you feel festive” (224)—where Lucille is overstimulated by the Jean-Harlow-style nightgown Billy purchases for her. It is not that Lucille doesn’t desire consumer goods, malls, plazas—collectively, the “thrilling” and “fake” terrain of the late South—but that she fears her desire of them. This is

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because desire (whatever its incarnation) disorients, and so represents an acute threat to Lucille’s identitarian practices of orientation and habitualization. Lucille, after all, has a bed (purchased at a yard sale, not a mall) with four assiduously polished brass balls that “shone like small suns at the corners of my universe” (68). She retreats to her bed because her family has voted over her relationship with Wayne—an especial irony since her life, she insists, is the only one that is “still intact” (68)— and in so doing, orients herself quite literally. To orient: “to place with the four faces toward the four points of the compass.” But orientation has consequences beyond the retreat to an enclave. “Lucille,” Rae tells her younger sister, “you live in your own little world.” Lucille’s response— “She was half right: it was my own. But it was not little” (45)—implies the dynamic by which she attempts to expand her habitat. Within the world of the text, Rae’s comment is apropos of nothing: Lucille has said nothing to her or anyone else. But as narrator, Lucille has been telling us a lot: “We should never have let [Rae] go to Washington. I don’t know why so many women do not foresee the future. They just do not see it coming. Then it hits them, and they say, Oh! a baby! Oh! a divorce! They have no foresight whatsoever, and get into situations they could easily have avoided with a little thought, a little observation, a little contraception” (44– 45). Here we have a generalized narrative about women that is highly individualized in both its origin (it derives from Lucille’s identity theme of vigilance) and its application (we should never have let Rae go to Washington). Lucille is an inveterate scripter, by which I mean to indicate her desire to caste other characters in scripts that following the internal logic of “her own little world.” Whether it is, in fact, little is debatable, but its capaciousness, for reasons we have already described, is being eroded. Scripting, however, involves more that the expansion of an imagined geography; it insists that others participate. Typically, Lucille’s scripts are oriented around domestic stability and the preservation of the comforts of home, and they are not always pernicious. When, for example, Rae decides to give up her baby for adoption, Lucille responds with a script that is explicit and detailed: “You have to decide right now to love this baby, even if it’s going to give you cavities and tire you to the bone for years and years. You have to say, I want this baby” (151). Rae capitulates to Lucille’s script, and it’s probably for the best. Nevertheless, Lucille’s penchant for domestic scripts causes some blind spots, most notably regarding her father’s relationship with Vera Oxendine. “Poor Vera,” Lucille relates, “thought she could just step in. She didn’t know the power of a twenty-seven-year-long love” (176). When Vera later appears at the Odoms’ house after Helen has returned to care for Rae’s baby, Lucille sends her away with the news that Helen has returned

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home. “This time,” Lucille says, “I would hold things together around here” (254), a script that involves casting her father as a “60 year old . . . [for whom it was] too late to be starting life all over again” (254). Lucille is not the only character with this tendency. Rich in Love is rich in scripts; characters typically impose narrative patterns on the lives of others, often capriciously, as a way of locating them in the spaces they desire. Billy desires Rae at home; he scripts her with a condom and a needle. Rae desires Lucille at Fishbone’s; she “dolls” her up as an “Autumn” and takes her there (105). Friction ensues because of the multiplicity of scripts and desirable spaces, and because characters frequently resist the scripts and spaces of others. Lest this appear as a commonplace— true of all novels (or cultures) at all times—we might consider how the breakdown of coded territoriality and the proliferation of built environments and themed spaces multiply the number of scripts potentially available. Humphreys is acutely attuned to what Appadurai describes as the media-driven emergence of imagination as quotidian mental work. In Rich in Love, the script describes the transition from what Appadurai labels fantasy, “with its connotation of thought divorced from projects and actions” to imagination, which is implicitly “projective,” expressive, and externally oriented.35 And while Lucille’s tense projection of her “little world” onto larger spaces dominates the narrative, the tension is apparent in other characters as well. Rae’s crisis, for example, can be described as a regression from imagination (in which she projects herself into spaces such as Fishbone’s, Washington, D.C., and, more tentatively, a home with Billy) to fantasy, in which she desires to live in “the 1940s, a decade . . . full of purpose and sense” (148). Rae describes this regression as a loss of agency and space: “Sometimes, honestly, I think to myself, what am I doing here” (148); she knew what she was doing in Washington, D.C. But even as the scene of fantasy, the 1940s prove unstable, since for Billy, “the forties was Hitler and tires that blew out every time you went on a trip” (148), while Lucille enacts a Jamesonian reduction of history to style, remarking of the decade only that the “clothes were good” (147).36 Denied even her enclave of fantasy, Rae withdraws, increasingly silent, to her bedroom. If Rae’s loss of projective, imaginative space proceeds as a contraction, Lucille’s loss of reality proceeds in two directions. Not only are outside forces and external scripts threatening her habitat, her own desire has become deterritorialized— unmoored from the home. It is not until halfway through the novel that Lucille asks herself “what do you really want? . . . I had never asked it before,” and what comes to mind is: “Exercise, yes: at its origins the word meant driving the animals out of their pens” (128). There is a suggestive causality to this sequence, which begins with an inquiry into desire and then shifts to the imagery of escape.37 Desire is no

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respecter of territorialities or codes (“I could imagine desire outweighing ethics”), and its disruptive tendencies often terminate in arbitrary objects. Lucille desires “apricot frost” and so steals it, violating the laws of the store-space, which demand payment in exchange for lipstick; Helen desires “sea biscuit” (a paint color with which she wants to “criminally” redecorate) and slipcovers (“I got so excited about the fabric I dreamed about it” [208]) and must leave home to get them. The point here is not that small or arbitrary objects can generate or locate desire, but that desire presses relentlessly toward the world, consequences (and spaces) be damned. Desire, that is, is not content in the frictionless world of fantasy, but wants to enter the real world; for this reason, we can consider it the engine of the script. Most crucially this is true with respect to Lucille’s evolving desire—she calls it “love”; the distinction is purely semantic—for Billy. Following its origin in “a black and white French movie” and moving through various false starts and surrogate couplings with Wayne, Lucille’s desire locates Billy as its object, in spite of Lucille’s fantasy that it might “live in a frictionless environment, not ground down by the rub of the physical world” (166). One reason we know that it can’t is that Lucille immediately attempts to dissuade Billy from becoming a high-school teacher. “But you don’t go out and get a job that fits what you already are. That’s what’s so great about these ads. I read them all the time. They’re little windows, and I look through them into a possible new life. Listen: ‘Hostess, top pay, good working conditions.’ I could do that. ‘Night auditor.’ ‘Care for elderly lady.’ I could just go get one of these jobs, and my whole life would change overnight” (169). The irony here is that Lucille describes her own capacity for improvisation as a way of scripting Billy’s future, about which she is “terrified”: “I felt responsible for him” (171). The irony is doubled when we consider that earlier she has imagined her future as a spinster: “Librarians, nuns, ladies who write poetry, are all spinsterly; they like a quiet place, they like to think, they don’t mind being alone. That’s what appealed to me. I also liked the predictability of these lives; old maids don’t want a change in schedule. No surprises please. I wanted, like them, to know a year in advance what tour I was going to take the next August. . . . I wanted to be well-organized” (33). In this shift from organized repetition to improvisation, Lucille is also describing a transition from contraction to projection, from isolation to shared space. The room where Billy writes his dissertation assumes this significance as the container of desire: “I liked the idea of Billy in that room. I could think of examples of women kept in rooms (Rapunzel, Colette, the Lady of Shallot), but none of men, and I found the idea of it . . . well, delicious” (212). Architecturally, the room is improvised, “not an integral part of the house” whose integrity, we recall, Lucille has guarded so carefully, but rather an “addition nailed in” that Lucille has used as a

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“hideaway when I wanted to be alone” (212). For reasons that are quite overdetermined, then, it is appropriate that here Lucille’s desire plugs into Billy, and that here, in Lucille’s terms, she plugs into the world. “Love,” she says, “pulled me into the world. Without it I’d have stayed ensconced” (233). If a frictionless environment describes rather precisely what Lucille has wanted all along, desire renders that habitat as a deficit, a space separate from “the world” toward which desire pulls her. The radical nature of this shift can be gauged by how dissonant the word “betrayal,” with which Lucille initiates her family’s fall into narrative, has become by this point. Just as Billy refuses to “hate” himself for his experiment with contraception because it was “an act of love” (232), Lucille offers no regret for what surely is conceivable as an act of betrayal to her sister: “I will never wish it had never happened” (233). Nor is the act coded as morally neutral, as it might be in the world of Bobbie Ann Mason; rather, it is subject to intense, contingent morality—a kind of hypermorality, if you will, in which the act is both excessively right and wrong. Certainly it is transient, lacking all permanence—“Per, throughout, plus manere, to remain” (204)—as Lucille recognizes immediately after the coupling when she tells Billy, “We are only in the same kitchen, drinking the same brand of beer. That is the extent of our connection” (246). To return to Žižek’s formulation of the grid shift, it is not, finally, that regressive losses or progressive gains have been recorded, but that desire has fundamentally disoriented and reoriented the nodes around which reality accumulates: family, home, habitat, space. Rich in Love is, finally, a novel in the subjunctive mood—“for use,” Lucille learns reading Virgil, “in matters of supposal, desire, possibility.” Lucille appreciates the grammatical tense: “My moods, the feelings that came upon me without warning and seemed to have no name—that’s what they were. Subjunctive moods, somewhere between what’s real and what’s not” (217). It is precisely this liminal space in which Lucille locates family as she thinks of times “long before Latin, when words were new and had no connotations. Pure words stood for single things: ‘Family’ meant people in a house together. But that was in a language so far back that all its words are gone, a language we can only imagine” (260). It is not a language whose meanings Lucille wants to recover, but a language whose inaccessibility marks a postlapsarian world, an improvised world of nomadic desires and impermanent spaces—of subjunctive spaces, between what’s real and what’s not. Under these conditions, to link “family” and “house” under the aegis of reality is to search in vain for a root meaning in a world of contingencies. For this reason, the forms of breakage—of family and space—with which we began have given way to the plasticity of the real—that is to say, its capacity, as a function of desire, to attach itself and adhere tenuously to bodies, spaces, even lipsticks. If

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Lucille begins by imagining the breakdown of family and the fracturing of space, she ends by imagining family as a gravitational pull, a way that persons bend toward one another in space. If Lucille’s initial quest is to preserve an Archimedean point from which she can leverage reality, she has come to engage creatively a world without leverage.

chap ter 7 southern loops A Circular Conclusion

From just south of Humphreys’s Charleston, in Padgett Powell’s Edisto (1983), Simons Manigault and his maybe-black, maybe-surrogate father-figure Taurus take a trip to Charleston “for no other reason than the good old days” and to prepare for a date—Simons’s first. As Simons tells it, “Suddenly great old patinaed John Calhoun and the green shutters all vanished before what I was sure was the dawning of the real, present South, a new land full not of ghosts but of willing gentlewomen.” The vanished green shutters, one of which has fallen and nearly broken Simons’s foot earlier in the day, weigh “about a hundred pounds,” which is why, Simons explains, “they never departed this world in the hurricanes which probably took a house or two out from under them.” As material objects, they are cultural survivors, “stouter than planters’ summer homes and stronger than a cotton economy.” Fallen, the shutter looks to Simons “like the top of a treasure chest.” Calhoun, too, survives in “bronze about forty feet tall,” although it’s not clear what his survival means: “it seems he’s doing something about the Confederacy by standing up there so very proudly, but I don’t know what, because I don’t know what he did, if he was a decent Reb or a bad one or anything.” With the imagined arrival of willing gentlewomen, however, both material and memorial objects recede into a ghostly South juxtaposed sharply against the dawning “real, present South” of erotic possibility. Although that South fails to materialize—Simons finds Taurus’s date infinitely more desirable than his own, a “shiny” girl who “looked like something at a recital”—the question I want to consider is why it’s still the South in the first place—more specifically, why desire is still pressing out toward a territory known by that name.1 A recursive return to the South persists throughout Edisto, which continually meditates on the preservation and destruction of southern territories. Like Will Reese in Humphreys’s Dreams of Sleep, Simons is acutely attuned to the destructionby-development of authentic southern habitats, although his invading Goths are Arabs, not Atlantans and Ohioans. But Simons works through his authenticity fetish in a way that Will never does, coming to feel at home despite leaving the quaint charms of Edisto Island for the fake world of “old brand-new Hilton Head,” which

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he initially views as “the first solid Arab bastion and a pure squat of hell.” Eventually, however, he comes to judge Hilton Head as “somehow pleasant enough”: Living in a joint where the oaks are robbed of their moss and amputated of their little limbs is like living in an architect’s model, and sleeping in redwood boxes is fakey, like being a cigar, and we now have furniture that will not make noise, and all those sailboats tinkling halyards against mast day and night, never been out of the harbor, is evil, or something, at least screwball as hell, but now I wonder: Who’s to say all that stuff I left—the Grand, Taurus, the Georgia-Pacific pagoda and plantation of weeds—what if all that’s the museum? . . . . . . Just because this place looks like a layout on a ping-pong table don’t mean it ain’t happening right here too. . . . It’s the modern world. I have to accept it. I’m a pioneer. As a pioneer, Simons adapts to the modern world using a very old story, and the new place to which he’s adapting is still a southern place. According to Simons, a local scalawag had sold out coastal properties, including his present simulated habitus, to his hypothetical Arabs, a treacherous scheme thwarted only at Cumberland Island by “the Carnegie Steel people,” who sold “their old joint cheap to the feds.” This, too, is a very old story, although the actors (save scalawags) have traded places in Simons’s gloss: “Yankee steel preserving the South, Arabs the new Yankees, scalawags persisting as usual, and the place is consequently as confused as during Reconstruction.”2 So confusion is recouped as a form of order; so culture stories prove stouter than a cotton economy; so the South survives another round of mechanical reconstruction. Negotiating a series of artificial environments, Simons decides that where he lives is real, and that it is the South. He is not alone in coming to these conclusions. Southern survivals are not unusual in even the most virtual of environments. In William Gibson’s Neuromancer—singled out by Jameson as “an exceptional literary realization” of cognitively mapping “the impossible totality of the contemporary world system”—“entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly,” only to reappear later through the intervention of a “kind of ghostly teenage DNA . . . that carried the coded precepts of various short-lived subcults and replicated them at odd intervals.” 3 There is also a Dixie Flatline, a ROM construct preserved in a database, who converses with the novel’s protagonist from the virtual netherworld in the quaintest southern drawl. In this survival,

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I suggest, lies a kind of allegory of the South’s persistence in the postelectronic age. A similar allegory is suggested by a March 2004 article in Southern Living magazine. “The word ‘community’ used to be easy to pigeonhole,” it begins. “It meant your town or suburb—the neighbor across the white picket fence, the grocer, the druggist, and the butcher down the street.” Although the imagined geography here evinces the unsubtle pressures of Southern Living—what fence but a white picket one? The butcher down the suburban street?—the article goes on to observe (somewhat breathlessly for 2004) that “people from different cities, states, and countries can visit a Web site and, whether they realize it or not, become a part of an online community.” The article goes to describe how members of Southern Living’s online community, through which virtual interaction had “become a supplementary support system outside their already full ‘real’ lives, had “mobilized and moved the message board” to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, for an “actual meet and greet”—not, the article clarifies, “a cyber or virtual meeting, but rather a bona fide in-the-flesh gathering.”4 Despite the new technology, there is, I suggest, nothing especially new here: an imagined community secured representationally in virtual space finds its way into actual space under the aegis of “the South.” That loop—from “From Real to Virtual and Back Again,” as the article’s title has it—shows little sign of wear. As Appadurai suggests, intensified flows of globalized media permit the maintenance of collective identities unsecured by physical proximity, but at the same time, such identities never seem to operate, as it were, post-spatially: ideas of territoriality persist in even the most virtual of environments. Territoriality, it seems, isn’t dead. It isn’t even past. If the opening of virtual space also opens, as Shawn Wilbur suggests and as Southern Living affirms, a space “for something like community . . . at a time when so many forms of ‘real life’ communities seem under attack,” there has also been, as Daniel Punday observes, an increased awareness of “how profoundly conventional social practices shape this new noncorporeal space” wherein individuals “frequently rely on stereotypes built up in the real world or learned through mass media.”5 Returning to Neuromancer’s metaphor of cultural DNA, we should have to conclude that the archive of social practices and stereotypes emerging from some real South have survived a kind of Darwinian test to reproduce (at least) a cognitive map—or perhaps a “consensual hallucination,” to borrow Neuromancer’s description of cyberspace—of something we continue to call the South. Looked at another way, however, the cycle from real to virtual and back again can be said to describe all cultures at all times, since culture’s material dimension always and everywhere exists in dynamic relation with representations of culture. Under the stresses and flows of a late capitalist economy, that relation has become increasingly

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thinned and defamiliarized, producing an anxious relation between culture’s material and symbolic domains. This is seen most clearly, perhaps, in the form of the cultural commodity and its ghostly values as they are constituted through processes of exchange. In the age of cultural reproduction, the very crudity of such exchanges, especially as they become (as Jameson says) the business of global American Disneyland-related corporations selling regionalism to the regions, makes it difficult to decide whether regional cultures are “authentic any longer (and indeed whether that term still means anything).” But that term, I’ve argued, still means something, and what it means is this: we are still using regional culture as a tool to organize spaces, to build environments, and to tell stories. Edisto’s dual move encapsulates the narrative work of late southern culture, where the simulacrum never quite materializes precisely because the real and the fake—the very question of what authenticity still means—continue to operate powerfully as tools for navigating social worlds. Put another way, Baudrillard’s radicalizing move, the collapse of real and the fake within a “hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere,” simply fails to get very far off the ground in the late South, where combinatory models continually recur to territories possessing atmosphere and aura, even as such properties increasingly result from what Deleuze and Guattari describe as capitalism’s artificial reterritorializaton.6 To adapt their argument and language, “everything returns or recurs,” thus transforming the late South into a kind of “motley painting of everything that has ever been believed” about the Souths that preceded it. Late southerners do not inhabit or imagine—or imagine and thus inhabit—hyperspace, but actual space, and their modes of habitation often acquire coherence, as we see enacted neatly in Edisto, as projects mobilized against the abstracting and deterritorializing pressures of postmodern capital. Others may wander the delirious terrain of the hyperreal, but as for me and my house, or neighborhood, or community, or region, we’re keeping it real, because, for one thing, keeping it real keeps us us, whoever we are. It is precisely such fictions, I have argued, that narratives provide in ways that strive to secure identities, cultures, and their locations as real, not fake, continuous, not contingent. Contingent fakes describes where the other guy lives, and even in such strategies of disavowal, authenticity continues to operate as a grammar of realityproduction. In pushing away from the tropes of the fake South, I am still using the South as a cartographic tool, a legend. In all this, there is, of course, no small measure of fabrication, improvisation, contingency and outright fakery, no negligible dose of what David Harvey calls the “fleeting, superficial, and illusory means whereby an individualistic society of transients sets forth its nostalgia for common values.” But Harvey’s, too, is a nostalgic tale, a decline narrative of a preindividu-

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alistic age of residents (to return to Bobbie Ann Mason’s enabling opposition) living free of the burden of nostalgia. Similarly, Baudrillard operates a decline narrative of an age, somewhere, at some time, wherein the real and the fake operated as a real opposition. My categorical distrust of decline narratives as empirical registers leads me to a skeptical stance toward Harvey’s position that “insofar as identity is increasingly dependent on images . . . the serial and recursive replication of identities (individual, corporate, institutional, and political) becomes a very real possibility and problem.”7 Specifically, I see less possibility for mere replication than for improvisation and innovation, since images themselves help to constitute the regime of style to which identity is increasingly subject. Even here, however, the apocalyptic connotations that naturally, as it were, attach themselves to the idea of designer pasts, designer cultures, designer identities, designer Souths, and so forth seem to me artificially and unduly attached, since the rupture they presuppose depends upon a valorized authenticity that, upon closer inspection, may well prove less than desirable. The thinning of culture, in other words, is legible as decline only if the thick culture it replaces is relationally superior—only if the authentic culture to which Jameson gestures is better than the one subjected to the EPCOT syndrome. This is precisely the premise of which I am skeptical. The emergence of cosmopolitanism as an intellectual brand suggests the logic behind this skepticism. To return to Appiah’s formulation, elegant in its simplicity, that cosmopolitanism equals universality plus difference, we can probably push the formula further to say that cosmopolitanism equals more universality plus less difference, where cultural difference, as Appiah suggests, means an increasingly nominal matter of the “gap between us here and them there.” Such gaps are harder to maintain in a spatially and culturally heterogeneous South—one whose very heterogeneity makes it more like the rest of the world. This is not to say that such gaps simply disappear. On the contrary, as we have seen, they are mobilized in multiple efforts to carve out symbolic territorialities of ever-increasing specificity. If Appiah’s premises point to the ascendancy of McWorld over Jihad, at least where liberal democracies are concerned, it is worth observing that McDonald’s itself commands only a slight portion of McWorld’s market. A mile from my house, on High Point Road, one finds within a half-mile stretch Po Folks, Carolina’s Diner, Southern Pride Café (“Where Good Food and Good Friends Meet”), and Stamey’s Old-Fashioned Barbeque, which locals will be happy to evaluate for you relative to the multiple barbeque styles available in the area, the state, the South, and the nation. (Just as trout produces the highest text-per-catch ratio of any American fish, so barbeque produces the highest text-per-calorie ratio of any American food. This is why it is not just a food, but a foodway.) The same stretch

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of road also includes El Paraiso Restaurante (“Comida Mexicana Centro Americana”), San Luis Mexican Restaurant (“Authentic Mexican Food”), Ghassan’s Kabobs, Alounemay Oriental Food Market II, Akashi Japanese Restaurant, Saffron Indian Cuisine, China King International Buffet, Pho Viet Nam Restaurant, and Manu’s African Braids. One can travel this road and still come home to read, as I did recently in the local paper, that “Southern tales stem from ‘ jaw-wagging tradition.’ ” Advertising a public reading emerging from Algonquin Books’s 2006 version of New Stories from the South, columnist Jeri Rowe suggests that “like sweet tea and flue-cured tobacco, our Southernness has become one addictive export.” “Southerners are natural storytellers,” Rowe explains (with an assist from Allan Gurganus), “because of geography”: “At one time, they lived in the country’s leastpopulated region and passed the time by telling stories that married hilarity and tragedy in a rhythmic cadence akin to the King James Bible.” The tradition survives today in “stories that depict the real South”—a South still “intoxicated by the pull of home and the grip of the land,” and including, “of course . . . an eccentric relative or two.” But according to Gurganus, the tradition survives in other ways as well. “You don’t need,” he says, “to write about Me Maw and Pe Paw and mules. You can apply that same energy and point of view to iPods, the Web, or anything else.”8 Paradox abounds. The effect of geographical isolation transformed into a cultural export. The cadence of the King James Bible in a region where such Bibles have long been scarce in the churches. Pe Paw and iPod in traditional series. Add to this an article on the same page of the Greensboro News and Record describing a trip by local representatives to Puebla, Mexico, in an effort “to gain insight into the fastgrowing immigrant population settling in Guilford County,” and the cognitive dissonance that must be surmounted in order to synthesize the one South (transient, culturally heterogeneous, spatially discontinuous) with the other (the semiotic residue of mules and the “grip of the land”) is remarkable.9 More remarkable is that Rowe calls the latter the real South. And yet to remark it is to suppress momentarily the capacity of narrative to absorb new content within old forms. By “form” here, I mean not only the formal structures one associates with literary narrative, but also “form” as it waits anxiously in an information economy to be supplied by “content.” In the late South, as the career of Jan Karon suggests, there is considerable overlap between the two. To view Pe Paw and iPod in discontinuous sequence is to ignore that what’s on the iPod in the first place might well be Pe Paw’s Greatest Hits or other “real”/“southern” music. (The potential sutures here are legion: everything from the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack to Hayseed Dixie’s bluegrass cover of Kiss’s “Detroit Rock City”— from Master P to Johnny Cash.) Similarly, Algonquin Books has positioned it-

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self to ship annually the kind of narcotic export described by Rowe, who will likely write a similar article upon the publication of next year’s New Stories from the South. The long-heralded death of southern literature hasn’t materialized, not least because the cultural marketplace has established a brand niche for southern literature, whatever its content. Headquartered at the New York Times Book Review, the book review industry can be relied upon to make the obligatory references to Faulkner, Welty, and Hurston, or at least to the figures of “Faulkner,” “Welty,” and “Hurston” as they have come to occupy a authorial pantheon altogether severed from the texts produced by the authors so nominated. The books themselves, as material objects, continue to trumpet southern literature. To take but one example, the paperback version of Barry Hannah’s Yonder Stands Your Orphan describes the novel as (among other things) “a searing picture of the American South.” From among the seven reviews cited on the cover and the twenty-nine cited (rather excessively) in the flyleaves, we learn that Hannah is a “Southern Gothic master,” “the Big Daddy of Southern letters,” and “a hilarious and incisive satirist of the contemporary South.” We learn that Yonder Stands Your Orphan is “as good as it gets,” if you want “Southern Gothic”; that it is “a masterpiece of Southern beat terror gospel” (whatever that is); that it contains “inimitable, word-sodden Southern wails”; that it has “a dry Southern wit.” Sodden or dry, wails or wit, it’s all (somehow) southern. Although a southern literary history has yet to be written under the aegis of the methodologies collated under “history of the book,” such a history would show, I suspect, a paratextual proliferation of conspicuous southernness correlating roughly to the subscription rate of Southern Living magazine. If tradition must be at least partially liquidated in order for it to circulate as commodity, then I remain skeptical that such liquidation implicitly constitutes a decline narrative—a matter of, in Baudrillard’s terms, a “whole system becom[ing] weightless . . . never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.”10 That the South, as a multiply constituted and increasingly soft time-space fusion, continues to be exchanged cannot be doubted, and here I follow Rodger Lyle Brown’s insistence that “space and time are not just matters of opinion: they operate in the world with the full impact of objective fact.” But Brown’s provocative reading of cultural festivals of the late South recurs to a Baudrillardian concept of the simulacrum as nativist illusion and “fantasized escapist dreamlan[d].” “With the small-scale, intimate relations of economic production having been disrupted,” Brown concludes, “certain segments of the southern population are responding by conjuring up images of a lost paradise that never existed, by ghost dancing on the cracker circuit.”11 Although, as this project has suggested throughout, there is much in this formulation

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I find persuasive, I depart from Brown in considering such circuitry as constitutive of culture rather than a dead attempt to conjure or simulate it. In other words, I believe that the ghost dancing works (because culture is never something that one simply has) and, moreover, that the ghosts so produced tend to be, on the whole, friendlier ghosts than, say, those haunting Quentin Compson from his and their spectral barracks. The liquidation of tradition and its subsequent flow into reified and commodified forms of culture does not simply cause tradition to evaporate, but rather initiates its acquisition of the vaporous properties inherently attached to the fetish, itself inevitably embedded in an uneasy economy of disavowal. Contemplating fetishism’s status as an “outlaw strategy of dereification,” Emily Apter identifies a crucial property of what I have labeled a regime of cultural reproduction: “Whether it is in the silent quotation marks that form around postured, literary speech, or in the ironic distance that collects between the eye and its erotic object, or in the spectral semblance of value that descends over the commodity . . . or in the halo of hyperreality attached to hypostatized nationmarkers . . . a consistent displacing of reference occurs, paradoxically, as a result of so much fixing. Fetishism, in spite of itself, unfixes representations even as it enables them to become monolithic ‘signs’ of culture.”12 So, I suggest, irony inevitably underwrites (or overwrites) cultural reproduction, opening a space of play within the domain of traditional cultural work, creating a space of contingency even as cultural forms strive toward some unrecoverable essence. Such efforts to fix culture as continuous—that is, as part of a genealogical narrative ensuring causal legibility—are doomed, like any machine, to wear, entropy, and eventual deterioration: even the most scrupulously maintained machines break down in time. But as Edward Ayers argues, the South is susceptible to a particular kind of creative destruction. “Those people,” he writes, “black and white, who care about their particular South should take heart from a vision in which regional identity is continuously being replenished even as other forms, older forms, erode and mutate. . . . There is no essence to be denied, no central theme to violate, no role in the national drama to be betrayed. The South is continually coming into being, continually being remade, continually struggling with its pasts.”13 Although I share Ayers’s sense of the replenishment and refashioning of southern regional identity, I depart, as this study has suggested throughout, from his position that essences, central themes, and nationally resonant dramatic roles become simply obsolescent. On the contrary, I suggest, these are the very materials out of which cultural reproduction proceeds, if in less totalizing ways than in more homogeneously territorial projects of culture. Lacking a central theme, even those “particular Souths” on the margins—Ibo Landing, for instance—lack coherent narratives of the kind

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microSouths seem to require, while at the level of national drama, the sim-South, as Nordan’s Wolf Whistle and any national election will evidence, is still trotted out to strut and fret its hour upon the American stage. The multiple and imbricated play of genealogy, essence, and imaginary geography compromise the South as coherent place, reproducing it instead as a constellation or field. In such deregulation—in the play of fixing/unfixing which I’ve argued characterizes a regime of cultural reproduction—lies, I suggest, an expanded potential for what Glissant calls a poetics of relation. Rhetorics of authenticity, precisely because they are legible as rhetorics, lack the capacity to secure cultural codes as fully naturalized and hence as a tacit dimension from which a pseudo-objective social world might emerge. The reality of his South having been deconstructed by John Dollard’s Caste and Class in a Southern Town as “fiction” of white supremacy, Donald Davidson described hyperbolically his need for “something to clutch”: “Familiar things have suddenly taken on a pasty, unreal complexion. The world has assumed a dizzy effervescence, like the nauseous boiling stir of termites under a wooden plank. Still worse, the perspective has altered sickeningly.”14 Such nausea, nauseating in its repression of alternative realities, is less possible in the contact zone of the late South, wherein the ubiquitous pressures of other cultures and other stories circulate more freely. Less goes without saying because more is said in the first place: so collapses Davidson’s autochthonous ideal in the welter of postautochthonous traditions. Good riddance. Better the impurities of the Coen Brother’s 1999 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? Generating visual aura through the computer-generated, sepia-tinted rural South (like in old-timey pictures!); marketing an “authentic” southern music through a soundtrack that put bluegrass back on the charts; layering hypertype on stereotype; meditating on the emergence of the brand (recall that Ulysses Everett McGill is no consumer of Fop, but rather a loyal “Dapper Dan man”), on sound bite politics (“We ain’t one-at-a-timing here,” says Governor Pappy O’Daniel, “we’s mass communication”), and on commodified forms of culture (the instantaneously “oldtimey” music of the Soggy Bottom Boys)—all within a narrative trajectory that farcically reproduces Joyce’s Ulysses and, through it, Homer’s Odyssey—O Brother, Where Art Thou? is as post-autochthonous as it gets. Like all of the Coen Brothers’ films, this one is eminently citable, and rivaling, to my mind at least, McGill’s celebrated and retroactively prophetic prediction that “the South is gonna change” is Homer Stokes’s condemnation of the Soggy Bottom Boys, who have already ruined his lynching and now threaten, through their celebrity endorsement of his political rival, his gubernatorial prospects. “These boys ain’t white,” Stokes insists. “Heck, they ain’t even old-timey.”15 Collating forms of purity—of races and pasts—

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Stokes articulates the precise threat authenticity and naturalized genealogies pose to culture. Writing in The Black Atlantic of the “discourse of authenticity” as it operates in the marketing of black folk-cultural forms, Paul Gilroy laments the unrealized potential of such discourse. “It is not enough,” he writes, “to point out that representing authenticity always involves artifice. . . . [T]his response also misses the opportunity to use music as a model that can break the deadlock between the two unsatisfactory positions that have dominated recent discussions of black cultural politics.”16 Those two positions, a black nationalism of absolute difference and a pluralism that dispenses altogether with the idea of authenticity, reproduce oppositions that enclose (and partially constitute) the field of narrative this project has examined. But within that field, as Maria Lauret argues, the recognition of “authenticity as a discourse”—one, I would add, that presumes, acquires, and reproduces narrative form—permits a vital interrogation of the contingencies of identity and identification involving, as Laurent suggests, the separation of “history from narrative play.”17 In this way, the discursive and tacitly ironized play of authenticity constitutes, in the most hopeful analysis, a soft stop between the excesses of atavistic essentialism and banal pluralism, thereby cultivating what Glissant calls “an aptitude for ‘giving on and with’ [donner-avec].” But in explicitly temporalizing a model of cultural identity in which “the old idea of identity as root [emphasis added]” gives way under the pressures of late modernity, the “speeding up of relationships” enabled by “immediacy of contacts” and “brutality of the flash agents of Communication,” Glissant suppresses the emergence of the new idea of identity as root which, I have argued, permeates the late South and its narrative fabrication of cultural genealogies.18 Moving in and out of rhetorics of authenticity, to return to Mary Louise Pratt’s formulation, constitutes a pervasive form of cognitive navigation and actual travel in the late South. Returning to Žižek’s insistence that historical process does not follow the logic of narration, I have argued that the gap between the two has widened considerably in the late South. An exchange between Susan Donaldson and Michael O’Brien in a Mississippi Quarterly forum on O’Brien’s Conjectures of Order helps to illustrate the point and its consequences. Responding to Donaldson’s criticism that Conjectures of Order suppresses the “omissions and silences” generated by Africanist presence in the antebellum South, O’Brien refuses the logic by which “the South is understood as a geographical space with a shared culture,” thereby predetermining any “narrative act of exclusion”—including his own, which focuses mainly on white southern conjectures—as “a denial of comity.” Reiterating a separate-butequal model of culture in which “blacks had their own play, their own commu-

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nity, with its own traditions, beliefs, and institutions,” O’Brien goes on to articulate his skepticism of the “intellectual cogency of multiculturalism” because, he claims, “it is a bastard form of cultural nationalism, which I see as authoritarian, while masquerading as descriptive.” Finding no evidence that the Old South was inclusive, O’Brien rejects what he characterizes as Donaldson’s “presentist morality,” which “implies that, if we describe the past inclusively, we breed habits of mind which will foster inclusiveness.” Better, he concludes, to narrate exclusion “because self-awareness cannot rest on illusion.”19 Although, as my argument in chapter 3 suggests, I share, on a purely empirical basis, O’Brien’s distrust of retroactively imposing a biracial southern culture as a tacit narrative ground, I am less persuaded of the pernicious consequences of such presentist narratives, especially as they operate in the culture at large. If self-awareness cannot rest on illusion (O’Brien chooses his terms shrewdly), then identity and culture surely can and perhaps must, which is why empiricist historiography of the kind practiced by O’Brien poses a threat to nationalism. But precisely here, in the domain of imagined geography and imagined community, I find the bastard form of cultural nationalism infinitely preferable to its legitimate heir, not least because its authoritarian praxis assumes ever gentler forms. In this context, I share Tara McPherson’s belief that “it is precisely from within the domain of representation that the difficulties and possibilities of a politics of alliance begin to emerge,” just as I share her hope that “in the South’s legacies, we might also find productive terrains for envisioning solidarity.”20 Certainly there is every reason to celebrate the loosening of symbolic forms that generated, in real time and real space, the tight spaces and disciplinary practices of closed Souths gone by. At the same time, the strict utopianism of such a view must be tempered by the realization that the late South is far from ideally consolidated. If the deterioration of organic metaphors of culture—the garden, the body—opens culture to improvisation and play, to multiple and interlocking uses, there remains the reality that such uses trend as often toward difference as toward unity. If NuSouth brands and represents an ideal South—my ideal, at any rate—there are still, figuratively speaking, plenty of t-shirts that reproduce the logic of “You Wear Your X, I’ll Wear Mine.” The paradigm of what I’ve called the microSouth cuts both ways. But even here, there are compensations, not least because such practices allow individuals and groups to get out of each other’s way in relatively—I stress relatively—humane ways. Better a cyber-Confederacy than a real one. If my South inevitably presents itself as the real South, the presence of your South and its competing rhetorics of authenticity, its alternative (but potentially intersecting) stories, inevitably puts the South in play as a site of negotiation and

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mutual navigation. In the end, we may come to different Souths, but neither will be solid in fact or in practice. In fact, we may dwell in alternative realities or simulations; still, that neither of us can practice our South in totalizing, territorial form generates an implicit poetics of relation. Under a regime of contingency and irony, to borrow Richard Rorty’s key words, solidarity will inevitably weaken, just as the age of mechanical reproduction liquidates, as Benjamin presciently foresaw, the traditional value of the cultural heritage. But who, today, would even want a solid South?

Notes INTRODUCTION 1. John Egerton, The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America (New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1974), xx; Edwin M. Yoder, “Thoughts on the Dixiefication of Dixie,” in Dixie Dateline: A Journalistic Portrait of the Contemporary South, ed. John Boles (Houston: Rice University Studies, 1983), 161. 2. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 1969), 221, 34. Predicting in many ways Appadurai’s insistence on the democratization of imagination (see discussion below), Benjamin calls attention to the collapse of the distance between artistic producers and consumers. Arguing that “the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character,” Benjamin points to the emergence of “letters to the editor” and the players in contemporaneous Russian films who “are not actors in our sense but people who portray themselves.” Tentatively embedded in these predictions, I suggest, we find prototypes of the blogosphere and “reality TV,” respectively, although the mode of mechanical reproduction embodied in these forms is, by most accounts, far from revolutionary in the sense Benjamin foresaw. See “Work of Art,” 231–32. 3. Vladimir Nabokov, “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” in Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov (1955; New York: Vintage, 1989), 312. 4. Zygmunt Bauman, “From Pilgrim to Tourist—or a Short History of Identity,” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 19. 5. Andreas Huyssen, “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia,” in Globalization, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 66. 6. Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 204, 204– 5. For discussion of the module as the “new result of reification” in “an informational universe,” the means whereby “intensified change is enabled by standardization itself” as “raw material is suddenly organized by categories into an appropriate unit,” see Seeds of Time, 15–16. 7. “Statement of Principles,” in I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, by Twelve Southerners (1930; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), xlvi. 8. Lewis P. Simpson, The Man of Letters in New England and the South: Essays on the History of the Literary Vocation in America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 248. 9. Twelve Southerners, “Statement of Principles,” xlvi. 10. Michael Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 5; James C. Cobb, The Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936–1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982). 11. Jean-François Lyotard, for example, argues that “capitalism inherently possesses the power to derealize familiar objects, social roles, and institutions to such a degree that the so-called realistic representations can no longer evoke reality except as nostalgia or mockery, as an occasion for suffering rather than for satisfaction,” a thesis fully consonant, as I have argued elsewhere, with Allen Tate’s analysis of the “new provincials” alienated from local traditions and thus condemned to live nowhere, to “see with, not through the eye.” See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,

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trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 74; Tate, “The New Provincialism: With an Epilogue on the Southern Novel,” in The Man of Letters in the Modern World: Selected Essays, 1928–1955 (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), 331; Scott Romine, “Where Is Southern Literature?: The Practice of Place in a Postsouthern Age,” in South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture, ed. Suzanne Jones and Sharon Monteith (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), 41. 12. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1998), 13. 13. Martyn Bone, The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), x, 42. 14. Smith, review of The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction, by Martyn Bone, Mississippi Quarterly 59.2 (2006): 373. Although I share Smith’s reluctance to mark a “hard” break, I think he has not foreclosed on ways of figuring a break of some kind. If, as Smith suggests, narratives of rupture are compromised because the South has always “been about the bling-bling,” then it does not follow that different regimes of bling do not operate in different eras, thereby necessitating, on some level, narratives that account for such breaks. The South’s shift from bound labor to wage labor to increasingly flexible and transient labor, for example, inevitably generates, I suggest, new forms of affect, new fictions of culture. Fictions of paternalism, in particular, by which labor relations were socially encoded in earlier Souths have become more or less superfluous in the era of flexible labor, Wal-Mart, and guest worker programs. More broadly, I suggest that of any thirteen ways of looking at—or telling about—the South, six will privilege continuity, six rupture, with the final one ambiguous. This is because there are no absolute criteria for either continuity or rupture; they are stories. 15. William Henry Trescot, “The Position and Course of the South” (Charleston: Steam PowerPress of Walker and James, 1850), 8; Karl Marx, “The Civil War in the United States,” Die Press 306 (7 November 1861). Trescot’s geographical logic struck a reviewer for DeBow’s as absurd. “Would not any one smile,” he wrote, “to think of the Ohio River and the Potomac, being such grand national barriers as must . . . constitute of necessity the nations on either side of them, diverse, independent, hostile to each other and capable of being at best but ‘unequally yoked together,’ and yet Mr. Trescott [sic], with great profoundness, announces this discovery.” See “The Position and Course of the South,” DeBow’s Review of the Southern and Western States 2.2 (February 1851): 231. 16. Trescot, “Position and Course,” 9. 17. Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States (1861; New York: Modern Library, 1984), 3. 18. Michael Kreyling, “Fee, Fie, Faux Faulkner: Parody and Postmodernism in Southern Literature,” Southern Review 29 (1993): 1. 19. Allen Tate, “Remarks on the Southern Religion,” in I’ll Take My Stand, 162; Stephen Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary, 2d ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 174. 20. Edward L. Ayers, “What We Talk about When We Talk about the South,” in All over the Map: Rethinking American Regions, ed. Edward L. Ayers, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Stephen Nissenbaum, and Peter S. Onuf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 69. 21. For an interesting analysis of Coca-Cola as a quasi-religious fetish operating in a broad range of global scenarios, see David Chidester, Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), esp. 40–43, 135–38. 22. Walter Benn Michaels, “Anti-Imperial Americanism,” in Cultures of U.S. Imperialism, ed.

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Donald Pease and Amy Kaplan (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 390. Although I share Michaels’s view that culture’s imperative dimension deteriorates under nongenealogical conditions and that “post-essentialist” accounts of race are covertly essentialist, I do not believe that race constitutes a special condition of genealogy, nor that nongenealogical forms of culture inherently lack an imperative dimension. 23. Bauman, “From Pilgrim to Tourist,” 19. 24. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 5, 7. 25. Jon Smith, “ ‘The Typical Personality of the Colonized’: Narcissism, Branding, and the Burden of Global-Southern History,” paper delivered at the Southern Intellectual History Conference (Charleston, South Carolina), February 2004. 26. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 25, 26. The third quotation borrows language from Clément Rosset. 27. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 33, 34. 28. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 161. 29. Richard Rorty, “A Comment on Robert Scholes’s ‘Tlon and Truth,’ ” in Realism and Representation, ed. George Levine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 187. 30. George Singleton, Novel (Orlando: Harcourt, 2005), 10. 31. In this context, “authentic” returns to its original meaning in English as “having authority.” 32. Signe Howell, “Whose Knowledge and Whose Power?: A New Perspective on Cultural Diffusion,” in Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge, ed. Richard Fardon (London: Routledge, 1995), 178. One might argue that the Agrarians meet both criteria. For an analysis that suggests such a conclusion, see John Shelton Reed, “For Dixieland: The Sectionalism of I’ll Take My Stand,” in A Band of Prophets: The Vanderbilt Agrarians after Fifty Years, ed. William C. Havard and Walter Sullivan (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 41–64. 33. Diane Roberts, “Living Southern in Southern Living,” in Dixie Debates: Perspectives on Southern Cultures, ed. Richard H. King and Helen Taylor (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 85. 34. The alternative narrative, of course, is the one found in the 1981 film The Gods Must Be Crazy, wherein a coke bottle dropped from an airplane corrupts the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert by introducing desire into their Edenic culture. 35. Howell, “Whose Knowledge?,” 177, 178. 36. Roberts, “Living Southern,” 86. 37. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 7. 38. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 66. 39. Steven D. Classen, Watching Jim Crow: The Struggles over Mississippi TV, 1955–1969 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 26, 55, 171. 40. J. Michael Dash, “Martinique/Mississippi: Edouard Glissant and Relational Insularity,” in Look Away!: The U.S. South in New World Studies, ed. Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 95. 41. “Three-Day Weekend: Franklin, Tennessee,” Turner South Cable Network , 27 January 2004. All descriptions and transcriptions are mine.

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42. Elizabeth Bishop, “Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” in The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983), 58. 43. Fred Chappell, Look Back All the Green Valley (New York: Picador USA, 1999), 93, 94. Text hereafter cited parenthetically. 44. I thank Fred Hobson for pointing out this detail (personal conversation). I am here, of course, speaking of the “real” Fred Chappell, not the “Fred Chappell” of the novel. The former informs me that although he did not base Hillbilly Heaven on an actual restaurant, several readers have alerted him that there are real restaurants by that name (personal conversation). 45. Fred Chappell, “The Shape of Appalachian Literature to Come: An Interview with Wil Hickson,” in The Future of Southern Letters, ed. Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 56. 46. Although Appalachia constitutes a crucial site of what I call cultural reproduction, I have chosen to exclude it from this study because, as an imagined geography, it introduces a number of distinctive variables that have tended to segregate it from the “real South.” For an excellent examination of Appalachia’s double alterity relative to “the South” and “America / the North,” see Rodger Cunningham, “Writing on the Cusp: Double Alterity and Minority Discourse in Appalachia,” in The Future of Southern Letters, ed. Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 41–53. 47. Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full (1998; New York: Bantam, 1999), 293. Text hereafter cited parenthetically. 48. For an excellent analysis of space in Wolfe’s novel, see Martyn Bone, Postsouthern Sense of Place, 192–218. 49. Patricia Yaeger, “Introduction: Narrating Space,” in The Geography of Identity, ed. Patricia Yaeger (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 18, 18–19, 10. 50. Johannes Fabian, “Of Dogs Alive, Birds Dead, and Time to Tell a Story,” in Chronotypes: The Construction of Time, ed. John Bender and David Wellbery (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1991), 189. 51. Fred Hobson, The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 10. 52. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 37, 61. 53. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 298. 54. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 298, 292. Although I have in mind here design shows such as “Design on a Dime” and “Trading Spaces” that mechanically transform the homes of persons like you into the homes one sees in the glossy world of the magazine, one of the generic constants of reality TV is the theming of space in which either a competition or a process of social negotiation occurs. Whether involving a self-contained environment (“The Simple Life,” “Survivor,” “The Real World”) or a series of alien environments that must be traveled (“The Amazing Race,” “The Real World: Road Trip”), one might argue that themed space is the essential feature—if not the quasiprotagonist—of this genre. 55. Donald Davidson, “Gulliver with Hay Fever,” American Review 9 (1937): 152. 56. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 118. 57. Lübbe paraphrased in Huyssen, “Present Pasts,” 70; Huyssen, “Present Pasts,” 71–72, 73. 58. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT, 1990), 71, 72. 59. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 14.

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CHAPTER 1 1. In referencing Baudrillard’s notorious reading of the first Gulf War as having occurred only on television, I mean to call attention to the irony of southern economic history—namely, that a historically “backward” economy has contributed several of the archetypes of late capitalism: CNN (compressing time and space as the first twenty-four-hour news channel; enabling the instantaneous circulation of images Baudrillard calls “virality”), Coca-Cola (the global brand), and WalMart (predatory or invasive capitalism). 2. Joel Garreau, The Nine Nations of North America (New York: Avon, 1981), 160. 3. Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (1998; New York: Vintage, 1999), 309, 311. 4. Emily Apter, “Introduction,” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 4. 5. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 2001), 48–49. 6. Henry Krips, Fetish: An Erotics of Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 15, 20, 21. For an account of nostalgia’s drift from its original “pathological and occupationally specialized meanings,” and in particular, the “semantic deterioration of its core referent of homesickness,” see Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociolog y of Nostalgia (New York: Free Press, 1979), 5; also 1–29. 7. V. S. Naipaul, A Turn in the South (1989; New York: Vintage, 1990), 31. 8. Ironically, as I discuss below, the narrative critiques Lost Cause ideology as fetishism. Mitchell here draws on the original meaning of fetish to designate “primitive” modes of religious practice involving material objects as “magic charms.” I follow Marx in suggesting that commodity fetishism (as enacted by Gone with the Wind) follows a similar “primitive” logic. 9. William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish,” Res 9 (Spring 1985): 12–13. 10. Helen Taylor, Scarlett’s Women: “Gone with the Wind” and Its Female Fans (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989). See especially 22–43. 11. Bone, Postsouthern Sense of Place, 144, 146, 145. 12. Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (1936; New York: Macmillan, 1964), 297–98. Text hereafter cited parenthetically. 13. In this broad context (and more particularly in Scarlett’s obsessive concern with her ledgers as sustaining a project of recovering her antebellum self), Gone with the Wind repeats a pattern identified by Melanie Benson wherein “the narcissistic imperative gives way to mathematical modes that strive for products—racial holism, for example, or neat equations of difference—that differ fundamentally from ontological reality.” Linking “compulsively repeated patterns of mathematical calculation, containment, and splitting” to the experience of postcolonial crisis and narcissistic trauma, Benson argues that such patterns, as “compulsively repeated strategies of representation,” reveal “fundamental fissures in their origin and relationships to ‘reality.’ ” See Benson, “ ‘Disturbing the Calculation’: The Narcissistic Arithmetic of Three Southern Writers,” Mississippi Quarterly 56.4 (2003): 637. 14. For Marx’s core analysis of the commodity fetish, see Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels (New York: Modern Library, 1906), esp. 80–85. 15. Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960; New York: Dell, 1969), 328. 16. Richard H. King, “The ‘Simple Story’s’ Ideology: Gone with the Wind and the New South

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Creed,” in Recasting: “Gone with the Wind” in American Culture, ed. Darden Asbury Pyron (Miami: University Presses of Florida, 1983), 179. 17. Žižek, Plague of Fantasies, 71. 18. Emily Apter, Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 13. 19. Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 58, 51. As I discuss below, Alice Randall exploits this slippage by dividing the plantation into “Cotton Farm” and “Tata.” 20. Jameson, Seeds of Time, 25. 21. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 230. 22. Although scholars have scrupulously catalogued the deviance of the film from the novel, I suggest here that the hypersaturated palette of the film’s technicolor landscape captures Tara’s essence by foregrounding, with colors not quite seen in nature, its dematerialized, specularized properties. 23. Carol Thomas Neely, “Women/Utopia/Fetish: Disavowal and Satisfied Desire in Margaret Cavenish’s New Blazing World and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera,” in Heterotopia: Postmodern Utopia and the Body Politic, ed. Tobin Siebers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 67, 94; Leiris, quoted in Apter, Feminizing the Fetish, 10. 24. Here I depart from the argument of Leigh Anne Duck, who argues that Gone with the Wind “depicted a cohesive nineteenth-century South that, in its hierarchically but mutually binding interracial culture, was represented as providing precisely the sustaining anticapitalist values often called for in contemporary discourse.” See Duck, The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 52. As my argument suggests, I see the narrative as repackaging culture for circulation in an emergent economy. 25. Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001), 15. 26. Jameson, Seeds of Time, 25. 27. Anne Goodwyn Jones, Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859–1936 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 349. 28. McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie, 49. 29. John Desmond, Risen Sons: Flannery O’Connor’s Vision of History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 212. 30. Bone, Postsouthern Sense of Place, 149. Bone argues that by juxtaposing the General’s body and the Coca-Cola machine, O’Connor suggests that “Confederate iconography has given way to commodity fetishism” (149). I would argue, however, that for O’Connor little separates them (as symmetrical false idols) in the first place—that, as mediated through Gone with the Wind, Confederate iconography is always, already commodified. For an alternative story of the Gone with the Wind premiere, see Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (1996; New York: HarperPerennial, 1997), 82– 109. In this chapter, Viviane (who drops the “e” later on to come closer to Vivien Leigh’s spelling), provides a detailed account of how Atlanta is “on fire with excitement!” over the premiere. Viviane’s investment in the Gone with the Wind phenomenon initiates the Ya-Ya project, since, as she explains in one letter, “I’m recording all our divine secrets . . . [because] I just know that somehow everything the four of us do is important” (98). 31. John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980; New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1987), 342. Text hereafter cited parenthetically. 32. See Betina Entzminger, The Belle Gone Bad: White Southern Women Writers and the Dark Seductress (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002).

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33. For a discussion of Blanche as the modern version of Scarlett, see Jefferson Humphries, “The Discourse of Southernness: Or, How We Can Know There Will Be Such a Thing as the South and Southern Literary Culture in the Twenty-First Century,” in The Future of Southern Letters, ed. Humphries and John Lowe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 127. Vivien Leigh, of course, played both characters in their film incarnations. Temperamentally, Blanche has more in common with Ashley Wilkes than with Scarlett; just as Ashley doesn’t want to “look on naked realities,” Blanche doesn’t “like the outlines of things too sharp. I like them gently blurred, a little hazy.” 34. Jay Tolson, Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 129. Tolson notes that the novel was enthusiastically recommended to Percy by his uncle William Alexander Percy, whose 1941 autobiography Lanterns on the Levee employs a similar nostalgic logic. 35. Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972), 82, 82. Text hereafter cited parenthetically. 36. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 75. 37. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 75. 38. Connor, Postmodernist Culture, 45. 39. Alexandra Ripley, Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind” (New York: Warner Books, 1991), 489, 491, 822. 40. Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 63. Text hereafter cited parenthetically. 41. At Tata, patina accumulates as the material residue of rage; the servants cover household surfaces with “the slime of hatred on every sliver of soap, every sheet smoothed across every bed” (26). 42. Alice Walker, “A Letter of the Times, or Should This Sado-Masochism Be Saved,” in You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (London: The Woman’s Press, 1981), 118. Text hereafter cited parenthetically. 43. Kathryn Stripling Byer, “Gone Again,” Shenandoah 53.4 (2003): 64–65. 44. Internet, www.mhvillage.com/Neighborhood.php?key=taraestates, 17 January 2006. 45. Internet, www.tara-inn.com/walls.htm, 17 January 2006. 46. Internet, www.tara-inn.com/accolades.htm, 17 January 2006. Another review, from the Dallas Morning Herald, claims that at the inn, “you realize that the owners Donna and Jim Winner have succeeded in capturing the essence of the grand mansion that was the cynosure of Gone with the Wind.” 47. Internet, www.tara-inn.com/accolades.htm, 17 January 2006. 48. Internet, biz.yahoo.com/e/051114/fgmg.ob10qsb.html, 17 January 2006. 49. Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 4. 50. Tinah Saunders, “Burt Reynolds’ Former Sanctuary Is a Classic,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 19 March 2004, Internet, www.ajc.com/business/content/business/private/0304/19private.html, 26 January 2006. 51. To Susan Myrick, the film’s historical consultant, Mitchell wrote, “I grieve to hear that Tara has columns.” See Darden Asbury Pyron, Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 370. 52. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon, 1998), 87. 53. Arjun Appadurai, “The Production of Locality,” in Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge, ed. Richard Fardon (London: Routledge, 1995), 205, 208, 209. 54. Internet, www.tara-estates.com/photoalbumpage.htm, 24 July 2005. 55. Appadurai, “Production,” 209.

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56. Appadurai notes that he originally used this term “to get away from the idea that group identities necessarily imply that ‘cultures’ need to be spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious, or ethnically homogeneous forms.” Yet neighborhoods, he continues in a claim that resonates provocatively in relation to Tara Club Estates, “are always to some extent ethnoscapes, insofar as they involve the ethnic projects of others as well as consciousness of such projects.” See “Production,” 208. CHAPTER 2 1. Tom Franklin, Poachers (New York: Morrow, 2000), 1. 2. The shopworn nature of southern hunting stories is suggested by George Singleton’s Novel, whose narrator—named Novel, incidentally—opines, “If I were to write a good southern scene about childhood friends who went to a hunt camp every weekend before Thanksgiving it’d go something like ‘Larry shot the deer two miles away from the cabin. After supper, everyone said it was the best venison ever.’ I wouldn’t take the time to go through pulling out the dressing knife, filleting the buck out, building a fire, whatever else goes on. People have fucking things to do.” See Singleton, Novel, 71. 3. Advertisement, Southern Living 39.1 (January 2004): NC1. 4. David Hellman, “Mud, Blood, and Beer: Grit Lit Classics,” Library Journal 126.10 (1 June 2001): 260. “Chicken-fried” has, of course, become a ubiquitous marker of the southern appropriation of alien culture productions: as soon as something is “chicken-fried,” it’s southern. This includes Pamela Cable, who penned Southern Fried Women and claims to be one, despite really being from Ohio. 5. Robert B. Downs, Books that Changed the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977). 6. Eric Plaag, “Making Sense of the Old South: Northern Travelers and the Coming of the American Civil War” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of South Carolina, 2006). 7. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” in Ways of Reading, 4th edition, ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky (New York: Bedford Books, 1996), 541. 8. John Pendleton Kennedy, Swallow Barn: or, A Sojourn in the Old Dominion, rev. ed. (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1853), 72. 9. V. S. Naipaul, A Turn in the South (1989; New York: Vintage, 1990), 221–22. Text hereafter cited parenthetically. 10. Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (1998; New York: Vintage, 1999), 366. Text hereafter cited parenthetically. 11. Pratt, “Arts,” 531. 12. Fredric Jameson, “On Cultural Studies,” in The Identity in Question, ed. John Rajchman (London: Routledge, 1995), 271, 272. 13. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (London: Fontana Press, 1988), 25. 14. K. Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Reading,” in Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture, ed. Vinay Dharwadker (New York: Routledge, 2001), 223, 22. 15. Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 117, 119. 16. Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Reading,” 222. 17. Appiah, Ethics, 115.

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18. Horkheimer and Adorno, “Culture Industry,” 131. 19. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 13, 14, 15. 20. See especially Walter Benn Michaels, “Autobiographies of the Ex-White Men: Why Race Is Not a Social Construction, in The Futures of American Studies, ed. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 231–47. 21. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 115. 22. Huyssen, “Present Pasts,” 63. 23. Paul Wells, “The Last Rebel: Southern Rock and Nostalgic Continuities,” in Dixie Debates, ed. King and Taylor, 117. 24. Internet, www.atlantaexecutivehomes.com/bookstore-atlanta-relocation.htm, 6 January 2006. 25. See Charles Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta: The Politics of Place in the City of Dreams (New York: Verso, 1996). For a literary tour of Atlanta as the archetypal “postsouthern” city, see Bone, Postsouthern Sense of Place, 139–241. 26. Gerald Johnson, “Greensboro, or What You Will,” in South Watching: Selected Essays by Gerald W. Johnson, ed. Fred Hobson (1924; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 45. 27. Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Reading,” 202. 28. Marianne Hirsch, “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile,” Poetics Today 17.4 (1996): 662. 29. Doris Sommer, “American Baroque,” in Localizing Knowledge in a Globalizing World: Recasting the Area Studies Debate, ed. Ali Mirseppassi, Amrita Basu, and Frederick Weaver (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 32, 34. 30. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom, 48. 31. One of the dark ironies of the incident is that Westerman’s killer didn’t know what the flag represented prior to his moving from Chicago to Kentucky. As he explains to Horwitz, “I thought it was just the Dukes of Hazzard sign” (116). 32. For reasons altogether obvious, given the Turner South brand, this museum is not on the itinerary of Todd and Anna during their visit to Franklin on “Three Day Weekend.” See the earlier discussion in the introduction. 33. As my discussion of Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle in chapter 4 suggests, this scenario is prevalent in contemporary culture, especially in its proliferation of conspiracy theories. As with Neo in the 1999 film The Matrix, Walt’s sense of reality’s being “not quite right” is resolved when he learns of the agent (here, Jews) “behind it all,” thus acting as a guarantor of his world’s ontological consistency. 34. A similar dynamic operates on the left as well, most notably in the design trend of “Che chic,” wherein the Marxist revolutionary is recuperated as brand icon. 35. Žižek, Plague of Fantasies, 11. As Žižek writes of the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew, “it is not the Jew who prevents Society from existing (from realizing itself as a full organic solidarity, etc.); rather, it is social antagonism which is primordial, and the figure of the Jew comes second as a fetish which materialized this hindrance.” 36. Horwitz’s double-bind here is palpable. On the one hand, he furtively identifies with the South’s self-fabrication as a culture resisting northern capitalism, which involves interpreting the war as “a culture war in which Yankees imposed their imperialist and capitalistic will on the agrarian South, just as the English had done to the Irish and Scots—and as America had done to the Indians and Mexicans in the name of Manifest Destiny” (69). On the other, Horwitz decodes this narrative

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as effacing the racial terrain on which the war was actually fought. He wants, in short, an economically traditional, but racially progressive South, and has trouble locating it in the real South. 37. An irony here is that Horwitz spends some time undermining as fakes more “historical” forms of remembrance at Civil War battlefields, most notably at Shiloh, where a location called “The Hornet’s Nest,” originally claimed as the turning point of the battle, turns out to be a mythical locale irrelevant to the battle’s main action. Similarly, a tree stump supposedly cut down by bullets probably didn’t exist at the time of the battle. See 175–82. 38. Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 12. 39. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), 33, 105, 205. 40. Edouard Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi, trans. Barbara Lewis and Thomas C. Spear (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999), 227. Reproducing the same margin/center relation as Naipaul, Glissant writes, “The South is not just a place of frontier; it is also this enclosed place”; see 230. 41. Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 143. 42. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 143. 43. See Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn, “Introduction: Uncanny Hybridities,” in Look Away! ed. Smith and Cohn, 11–12. 44. When Sass claims to have “some of the feeling for the old plantation life,” Naipaul asks whether he feel “nostalgia for what you don’t know.” Sass responds that his childhood visits to “the plantations” (“even though we didn’t have slavery”) demonstrated “the old easygoing rural life, and relations between the races were much more what they had been” (106). 45. Houston A. Baker Jr., “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere,” in Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity, ed. Dan Ben-Amos and Liliane Weissberg (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 264. 46. See Leigh Anne Duck, “Travel and Transference: V. S. Naipaul and the Plantation Past,” in Look Away!, ed. Smith and Cohn, 164–68. 47. Naipaul consistently registers roads as dead spaces, mere means to the teleological end of arriving somewhere. In stark contrast, Glissant thinks of roads as connective tissues traversing “closed places”: the trace, he writes, “leads into the Frontier and forecasts the Faraway. In its interconnected paths and uncertainties, it turns the world into an illuminated component of place”; see Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi, 253–54. 48. Duck, “Travel and Transference,” 165; also 161. Drawing from Dominick LaCapra’s concept that totalizing objectification constitutes the observing self as a “transcendental spectator of a scene fixed in amber,” Duck argues that the redneck detaches Naipaul’s South from a racially deadlocked terrain reminiscent of his Caribbean home, a form of “transferential travel” that leads to “both personal discomfort and deep-seated resistance”; see 164. 49. Baudrillard, “Precession,” 8, 7, 1. Ironically, Baudrillard fails to recognize that the entire incident was a hoax. 50. Duck, “Travel and Transference,” 167. 51. Steven Feld, “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music,” in Globilization, ed. Appadurai, 189, 196. 52. Malcomb Bradbury and James McFarland, “The Nature and Name of Modernism,” in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890–1930, ed. Bradbury and McFarland (London: Penguin, 1976), 25. 53. Duck, “Travel and Transference,” 155.

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CHAPTER 3 1. Leonard Pitts, “Don’t Sell Your Ambitions Short to ‘Keep It Real,’ ” Greensboro News and Record, 31 January 2005: A10. 2. Robert Reid-Pharr, Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3. 3. J. Martin Favor, Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 3. 4. Carol Stack, Return to Home: African-Americans Reclaim the Rural South (New York: Basic Books, 1996), xiv. 5. Leigh Anne Duck, “Go there tuh know there: Zora Neale Hurston and the Chronotope of the Folk,” American Literary History 13.2 (2001): 265, 266. 6. Hazel V. Carby, “The Politics of Fiction: Anthropology and the Folk,” in Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America (London: Verso, 1999), 171. 7. Houston A. Baker Jr., Turning South Again: Re-thinking Modernism / Re-reading Booker T. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 83, 24, 26. 8. Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature, 76, 86. Specifically, Kreyling is responding to Fred Hobson, for whom Ernest Gaines “realizes in his fiction most of those qualities that were long assumed to be the domain of the white Southern writer, ‘community’ and ‘place.’ ” Although Hobson identifies Gaines’s communities, his places, as black—and hence separate from the white communities that form the subject of, say, Faulkner’s work, or that hover ominously around the periphery of Gaines’s—“southern” provides a synthetic term that permits the merger of Faulkner and Gaines as part of a common literary tradition: southern literature in black and white. Conversely, Kreyling argues that “Gaines’s ‘place’ . . . seems to be in another tradition.” See Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature, 97; Hobson, Southern Writer, 94. 9. Anne Goodwyn Jones, review of Inventing Southern Literature, by Michael Kreyling, Mississippi Quarterly 52.4 (1999): 683. 10. Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature, 93, 86. 11. Jones, review of Inventing Southern Literature, 681, 683. 12. Thadious Davis, “Reclaiming the South,” in Bridging Southern Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. John Lowe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 66, 69, 58–59. Somewhat ironically, Davis deploys as evidence of the biracial South Southern magazine and its “larger vision of the culture . . . right up to its demise in 1989” (62–63). Against Davis’s criterion of accuracy (that Southern represented the real South), I would counterbalance a criterion of use. That, as Davis notes, “by the 1990s Southern had become a collector’s item” (63) suggests fewer users of the Southern South than the Southern Living South. Southern Living has flourished despite—or, less happily, because of—its implicitly white reader. For examinations of how Southern Living constructs its audience, see Roberts, “Living Southern,” and especially Amy Elias, “Postmodern Southern Vacation: Vacation Advertising, Globalization, and Southern Regionalism,” in South to a New Place, ed. Jones and Monteith, 253–82. 13. Judith Jackson Fossett, “A Symposium: New Souths,” Mississippi Quarterly 55.4 (Fall 2002): 571. 14. Michael O’Brien, Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 166. 15. Howard W. Odum, Southern Regions of the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936), 14.

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16. Cited in Jay Reeves, “The South: Blacks, Too, Proud to Be Southern,” Greensboro News and Record, 25 November 2005: A1, A8. 17. That is to say, no map precisely follows the normative criteria Odum establishes for his “Southeastern Region.” Two of Odum’s “cleanest” maps represent the percentage of “Negroes” (high in the South) and “Foreign Born Whites” (low in the South) in the national census of 1930; see Southern Regions, 14. In the former map, there are two anomalous states: Texas (conforming to the “Southeastern” criterion, but outside Odum’s Southeast) and Kentucky (nonconforming within the Southeast); the latter map has four anomalous states (Florida, nonconforming within the Southeast, and Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, conforming outside the Southeast). 18. Quoted in John Shelton Reed, One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 170. 19. Davis, “Reclaiming the South,” 58; Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature, 138. 20. McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie, 26. 21. Jon Smith, review of Reconstructing Dixie, by Tara McPherson, Mississippi Quarterly 57.4 (Fall 2004): 669. 22. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 14. 23. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 142, 144. 24. Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalization Is Reshaping Our Lives (New York: Routledge, 2003), 39; Žižek, Plague of Fantasies, 12–13. 25. Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terrence O. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Again, Giddens is on point, suggesting—as does Signe Howell; see discussion in my introduction—that “all traditions . . . are invented traditions.” Giddens returns, however, to posit what I view as an artificial opposition between “tradition that is drained of its content, and commercialised,” thus becoming either “heritage or kitsch,” and the “lifeblood of tradition, which is its connection with the experience of everyday life”; see Giddens, Runaway World, 40, 44. 26. Stuart Hall, “Introduction: Who Needs Identity?” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 3–4, 6. 27. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 143. 28. Nowhere is this belief more evident than in Taste of the South magazine, where consuming the South, “As rich in Tradition . . . As it is in Taste” (as the magazine’s subtitle advertises), is continually positioned between heritage and emerging forms of consumption. An article representative of this strategy describes the revival of the “tradition” of small town farmers’ markets “with a 21st century twist” that includes SUVs, minivans, and organic farming. See “Urban Farmers’ Markets: Everything Old Is New Again,” Taste of the South (Summer 2006): 68. Eating the South is not limited, of course, to mass consumption. The ivory halls of academia have been more than accommodating to southern food culture, most conspicuously, perhaps, in the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture and the proliferation of southern cookbooks from university presses throughout the region. 29. Mildred Council, “Introduction: A Life of Cooking,” in Mama Dip’s Kitchen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 4. The advice is seconded in Jim Erskine’s Southerner’s Book of Lists. Of the “Nine Rules of Southern Cooking,” number 3 admonishes: “Don’t start measurin’ ingredients and gettin’ all fired up over gettin’ a recipe just so. Southern cooking is done by taste, not by book.” See Erskine, The Southerner’s Book of Lists (Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing Company, 2000), n.p.

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30. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 135. 31. Doris Witt, Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 39. 32. Richard Brodhead, “Introduction,” in The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales, by Charles W. Chesnutt (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 3. 33. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 31. I return at greater length to Lefebvre’s analysis of space in chapter 5. In its practice of time-space decompression, Mama Dip’s Kitchen follows the broad logic of the Slow Food movement and its emphasis on food from local sources. 34. For a fascinating account of chitterlings and their position in the discourse of black food and identity, see Witt, Black Hunger, 79–86. Ralph Ellison observes that it took “a lot of living and going to France” before he realized that “well-cooked chitterlings are part of a cuisine,” and that there are “some great masters of Negro cooking.” See “What These Children Are Like,” in Going to the Territory (1986; New York: Vintage International, 1995), 67. 35. Lisa Jones, “Soul Lite: Soul Food Reimaged for the ’90s,” Village Voice (24–30 June 1998), 14, 18. 36. Ann Burns with Emily J. Jones, “African Americans into the Millennium: 55 Books for Black History Month and Beyond,” Library Journal (1 November 1999): 106. Mama Dip’s Kitchen is also featured on Crisco’s website celebrating Black History Month; see Crisco website, www.crisco. com/recipes/celebrations/black_history_month.asp, 5 August 2006. Proctor and Gamble’s sponsorship of the Black Family Heritage Cookbook led to some criticism, mainly surrounding the replacement of “traditional cooking fats” with Proctor and Gamble products. So withers aura in the age of Crisco. 37. Zakia Munirah Carter, “Cooking While Black: A Roundup,” www.africana.com/articles/ daily/index_20021119.asp, 31 August 2004. 38. Alice Demetrius Stock, “Vintage Cookbooks: African Heritage Cuisine Blossoms,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 3 February 2000, www.post-gazette.com/food/200000203vint7.asp, 21 February 2005. 39. Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Vibration Cooking: Or, the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl (1970; New York: Ballantine, 1992), 14. 40. Kathy Starr, The Soul of Southern Cooking (Montgomery, Ala.: NewSouth Books, 2002), 34. 41. Council, “Introduction: A Life of Cooking,” 27. 42. Council, “Introduction: A Life of Cooking,” 1, 22. 43. McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie, 8. 44. Percival Everett, “The Appropriation of Cultures,” in Damned If I Do: Stories (Saint Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 2004), 91. Text hereafter cited parenthetically. 45. Dan. D. Emmett, “I Wish I Was in Dixie’s Land” (New York, 1850). To add another layer of irony, Judith and Howard Sacks argue that Emmett learned the song from the former slaves who composed it, Thomas and Ellen Snowden. See Howard L. Sacks and Judith Rose Sacks, Way Up North in Dixie: A Black Family’s Claim to the Confederate Anthem (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995). It is likely that Everett’s reclamation of “Dixie” in this story is informed by the story of the Snowdens. My comments here are informed by a conversation at the Hickory Hill Forum (March 2006), and especially the comments of David S. Shields and Mills Thornton.

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46. Everett, Interview with Rone Shavers, BOMB Magazine, Summer 2004: 49. 47. Sean O’Hagan, “Colour Blind,” The Observer, 16 March 2003, books.guardian.co.uk/ departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,914871,00.html, 11 April 2005. 48. Alice Walker, “Everyday Use,” in In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), 57, 56. Text hereafter cited parenthetically. 49. Alice Walker, Meridian (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976), 128. 50. The roof of the new house is the only feature altered. Later in the passage, the mother caustically codes Dee’s assumption of choice: “She wrote me once that no matter where we ‘choose’ to live, she will manage to come see us.” The implication here is clear: the mother lives where she is, not where she chooses. Dee’s assumption of choice, conversely, presumes her own fashioning of personal and cultural identities. I thank Anne Goodwyn Jones for pointing out this textual detail to me, as well as suggesting some of the broad outlines of my argument in this paragraph (private conversation). 51. Alex Haley, Roots (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976), 578–79. Text hereafter cited parenthetically. 52. Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 224, 233–34, 234, 237. 53. See Keith Cartwright, Reading Africa into American Literature: Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002); Helen Taylor, “ ‘The Griot from Tennessee’: The Saga of Alex Haley’s Roots,” Critical Quarterly 37.2 (Spring 1993): 46–62. 54. Williams carefully documents the “loss of respect among intellectuals, leaders, and scholars, many of whom are resentful of a Reader’s Digest writer who became a folk hero on the basis of a lie” (237). Similarly, David Chioni Moore observes that Haley “has been subjected to a near total silence on the part of the intelligentsia”; see Moore, “Routes: Alex Haley’s Roots and the Rhetoric of Genealogy,” Transitions 64 (1994): 7. 55. Another reason they do is that, in Roots, blood is about all there is. Following the African chapters, which depict a thick culture (one critic called it an “African morass”), there is a surprisingly thin representation of African American culture except as the reproduction—perennially threatened by the carceral regime of the plantation—of a hypothetically “African” culture of resistance. 56. One describes the making of the film, while the other is a sequel to the events of the film. In the latter, Haagar’s granddaughter Amelia studies folklore at Brooklyn College and does fieldwork (in the tradition of Zora Neale Hurston) on Ibo Island. After negotiating the perils of a predictably pedantic faculty, she refuses to publish her work, since publication, she explains to her mentor, “will bring about the worst kind of change” to the Gullah culture. Like the mythical Tasaday in Baudrillard’s allegory, so vanishes Gullah culture from scholarly inspection. See Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust (New York: Dutton, 1997), 294. 57. Katherine Henninger, Ordering the Facade: Photography and Contemporary Southern Women’s Writing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), xx. 58. Frederick Luis Aldama, Postethnic Narrative Criticism: Magicorealism in Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, Ann Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 46, 45. 59. During a scholarly panel discussion on southern memory at the Hickory Hill Forum (2006), an audience member suggested, and not without reason, that the Peazants “look like the Kennedys at Cape Cod.” The danger of what might be called expressionist casting is suggested by a white student described by Tony Horwitz who wonders, “If slaves were so cruelly treated, why do they always have pretty teeth in the movies?” (Confederates 373).

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60. In its lingering shots of cultural objects, Dash’s camera work occasionally gravitates toward a musealized form of documentarianism (through the visual display of “how these people lived”). On the DVD version of the film, Dash’s commentary as writer and director is available as a soundtrack option; see “Audio Commentary by writer/director Julie Dash,” in Daughters of the Dust (1992; New York: Keno Video, n.d.). With virtually every scene, Dash explains the cultural significance and history of the depicted objects, modes of dress, rituals, and so forth. That her film ultimately suppresses so much of its archival potential speaks, I suggest, to its larger vision of culture, which transcends the narrow boundaries of the documentary style while at the same time covertly deploying it to achieve certain reality effects (see discussion below). For an excellent discussion of the film’s relation to the documentary form, see Henninger, Ordering the Facade. 61. Clothing constitutes an important symbolic code in the film. The dominant color is a pure white impervious to staining. Nana Peazant, however, wears indigo clothing symbolic of the slave regime, while Viola, Yellow Mary Peazant’s lesbian lover, wears yellow. Given that her skin is lighter than “Yellow” Mary’s, Viola’s clothing references the family’s recurrent fetishism of skin tone, as when a family member comments upon Yellow Mary’s arrival, “All that yellow wasted.” 62. Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust. All transcriptions from the film are mine. I have tried to reproduce without exaggerating the quality of the Gullah dialect that Dash self-consciously employs. In her audio commentary available on the DVD as an alternate soundtrack, Dash notes that Alva Rogers, who plays Eula, “speaks perfects English” but learned a “wonderful Gullah dialect” for the film. 63. And from the inside as well. Nana Peazant recounts that, given the frequent dissolution of slave families, slaves often returned to plantations not knowing of their ancestry. For this reason, they were unwittingly forced into incestuous relationships by slave masters desiring to increase their labor force. According to Nana, the work of the griot was to prevent such contamination by ensuring the accurate transmission of genealogies. 64. Henninger, Ordering the Facade, 124. 65. Bill Brown, The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 14. 66. Dash, audio commentary, Daughters of the Dust. Dash notes that the dialogue in this passage is borrowed from Paule Marshall’s “Praise Song for the Widow,” which she optioned for the film. 67. Cartwright, Reading Africa, 78; Homi K. Bhabha, “Culture’s In-Between,” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 59. CHAPTER 4 1. Mark Childress, Crazy in Alabama (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), 208, 276, 275, 358. The novel’s dual plotlines intersect in interesting ways. The apparent contrast between, on the one hand, the real historical struggle of racial violence in Alabama and, on the other, the commodification of southern stereotypes by the Hollywood culture industry is complicated and entangled by the narrative’s consistent interrogation of representation and its reductive praxis—one that operates in both terrains. 2. J. Mills Thornton III, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 570. 3. Childress, Crazy in Alabama, 272. 4. Recalling the “good old bad old days” syndrome that Tony Horwitz associates with the civil

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rights era, Levenson raises the question of nostalgia that Linda Williams addresses in Playing the Race Card (see discussion below). Of the PBS images, he writes that “strangely, we seem to treasure those black-and-white memories, and when we drag them out, we do it with a sort of pride.” See Levenson, “Divining Dixie,” Columbia Journalism Review 42.6 (March/April 2004): 20. 5. David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Villard Books, 1993), 437. Halberstam provides an interesting account of the journalists whose innovative work helped create what would become “the civil rights beat” (441), most notably William Bradford Huie, whose Look magazine article included the chilling confession of Till’s murderers, and John Popham of the New York Times. See especially 434–41. 6. Davidson, “Gulliver with Hay Fever,” 152, 154, 153. 7. James Baldwin, “The High Road to Destiny,” in Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Profile, ed. C. Eric Lincoln (New York: Hill and Wang, 1970), 95. 8. Lewis Nordan, Wolf Whistle (Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 1993), 213. Text hereafter cited parenthetically. 9. Lewis Nordan, “An Interview with the Author,” in Wolf Whistle (1993; Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 1995), n.p. 10. Philip Weinstein, “Cant Matter / Must Matter: Setting up the Loom in Faulknerian and Postcolonial Fiction,” in Look Away!, ed. Smith and Cohn, 356, 366, 367. 11. Lewis Nordan, “The Making of a Book,” Oxford American 11 (March–April 1995): 76. 12. Lewis Nordan, “Making of a Book,” 76. I should note that many of text’s strangest details— Bobo’s “demon eye,” Uncle’s identification of Bobo’s killer with the phrase “Thar he,” the sheriff’s “welcoming” the black press with “Mawnin’, niggers!” (236)—derive from historical incidents. 13. Carlos Fuentes, “La novela como tragedia,” in Casa con dos peurtas (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1969), 54. 14. Lewis Nordan, “Making of a Book,” 76. 15. Randall Kenan, “Mississippi Goddam,” The Nation, 15 November 1993: 592. 16. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 298. 17. Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 58. 18. Here I rely on Baudrillard’s criterion that the simulacrum displaces reality rather than copying it. 19. Jack Butler, “Still Southern after All These Years,” in The Future of Southern Letters, ed. Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 38. 20. As Fredric Jameson observes, “The stereotype is indeed the place of an illicit surplus of meaning, what Barthes calls the ‘nausea’ of mythologies.” See Jameson, “On Cultural Studies,” in The Identity in Question, ed. John Rajchman (London: Routledge, 1995), 274. 21. Slavoj Žižek, “The Matrix: Or, The Two Sides of Perversion,” in The Matrix and Philosophy, ed. William Irwin (Peru, Ill.: Carus, 2002), 257. 22. Douglas observes that the presence of dirt presupposes a system: “If uncleanness is matter out of place, we must approach it through order. Uncleanness or dirt is that which must not be included if a pattern is to be maintained. To recognize this is the first step toward insight into pollution.” In this way, pollution leads to the symbolic schema by which communities mediate, organize, and standardize the experience of individuals. See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966), 40. 23. Most obviously, the regulated Matrix of the film pleasurably conceals the “desert of the real”

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submerged beneath, leading one character, Cypher, who is aware of the illusion, to choose it over the reality. In contrast, as I discuss below, Arrow Catcher offers no such pleasure, at best sustaining a kind of bearable misery. 24. Žižek, “The Matrix,” 242. 25. In “The Making of a Book,” Nordan describes his deep and abiding respect for “the boy who had spoken those courageous words” and “exhibited such outrageous individualism without fear of reprisal or ostracism.” Uncannily, however, the man, whom Nordan contacted after the publication of Wolf Whistle, recalled the joke of the gin fan but not his public rejection of it. See “Making of a Book,” 76, 81. 26. Lewis Nordan, “Growing Up White in the South,” in Wolf Whistle (1993; Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 1995), n.p. 27. Nordan’s predominant strategies in “exaggerating blackness” are to expose the profound limitations placed on the performance of African American identity and to avoid the hagiographical register of race melodrama. Occasionally, however, he succumbs, in my opinion, to the temptations of the cheap joke, as in Auntee’s speculation on the “Blue Men.” 28. Žižek, “The Matrix,” 250, 252, 246. 29. Lord Montberclair’s plantation, Scratch Ankle, extends the economic violence of the Belgian Congo to the plantation culture of the U.S. South. When Solon reports Bobo’s actions, Lord Montberclair notes that if “that sassy little nigger lived out on Scratch Ankle,” “he’d evict them, whole family, simple as that, cut off their credit, anyway. That was the whole problem with letting foreign niggers come into town. Our own niggers don’t act like that” (61). 30. For an account of the differentiated set of strategies deployed among white social classes to maintain whiteness, see Brannon Costello, “Poor White Trash, Great White Hope: Race, Class, and the (De)Construction of Whiteness in Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle,” Critique 45.2 (Winter 2004): 207–223. 31. Among the men gathered at Red’s, the initial response is to repress awareness of Bobo’s violation of taboo, either by strategically ignoring it—“Seem like Red didn’t hear the spotey little boy” (34)—or by immediately covering the discursive rupture with unrelated discourse, as Runt, Gilbert Mecklin, and Rufus McKay attempt to do (35). Even when Solon confronts Bobo, Red attempts to distract him by changing the subject. 32. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4, 2. 33. For the classic work on this subject, see William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). In this scene, Nordan departs radically from Till’s murder, when his killers attempted to terrorize him prior to shooting him. 34. Gail Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (New York: Routledge, 1999), 96. 35. Fredric Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia,” New Left Review 25 ( January–February 2004): 38. 36. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 300. 37. Jean Baudrillard, “The Violence of the Image,” working paper, www.egs.edu/faculty/ baudrillard/baudrillard-the-violence-of-the-image.html, 24 February 2006. A contrast can be drawn here with the image of the “black blast” emanating from the castrated body of Joe Christmas in Faulkner’s Light in August. As I have argued elsewhere, the aestheticization of trauma in that novel recuperates the community’s racial fictions. See Romine, Narrative Forms of Southern Community (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), 190–95.

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38. Weinstein, “Cant Matter,” 67. In this context, the practice of Latin American magical realists is more consonant with the anti-utopian thinking of such diverse figures as Karl Popper, Friedrich Hayek, Jürgen Habermas, and John Rawls, who (in radically different ways) envision social progress as necessarily emanating from existing praxis. For further discussion, see Judith Shklar, “What Is the Use of Utopia?” in Heterotopia, ed. Siebers, esp. 54–56; and Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 3–4. 39. Žižek, The Matrix, 246. 40. William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (New York: Random House, 1942), 284; William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948; New York: Modern Library, 1964), 204, 203–4. Without regarding either McCaslin or Stevens as a mouthpiece character, I strongly concur with Weinstein’s assessment of Faulkner’s profound limitation in envisioning cultural rearrangements. 41. Patricia Yaeger, “Consuming Trauma; or, The Pleasures of Merely Circulating,” Journal X 1.2 (1997): 229, 228. 42. Kenan, “Mississippi Goddam,” 593, 594. 43. Randall Kenan, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead and Other Stories (San Diego: Harvest, 1992), 315, 314, 332. 44. Kenan, Let the Dead, 284, 276, 275–76. 45. Kenan, “Mississippi Goddam,” 592, 594. 46. Nordan, “Making of a Book,” 77. 47. Yaeger, “Consuming Trauma,” 235. 48. Jeff Abernathy, To Hell and Back: Race and Betrayal in the Southern Novel (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 13. Noting that “certain realistic scenes” act as vehicles for directly expressing emotional pain, Suzanne W. Jones argues that Nordan’s magical realism serves as a distancing mechanism complicit in a narrative of “white racial conversion”; see Race Mixing: Southern Fiction since the Sixties (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 31–33. CHAPTER 5 1. Joseph R. Urgo, “The Yoknapatawpha Project: The Map of a Deeper Existence,” Mississippi Quarterly 52.4 (Fall 2004): 639. 2. Richard Godden, Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South’s Long Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 3. See also Philip Weinstein’s analysis of Faulkner in the preceding chapter. 3. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 31, 31. 4. James A. Grimshaw Jr., “Clyde Edgerton: Death and Dying,” in Southern Writers at Century’s End, ed. Jeffrey J. Folks and James A. Perkins (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 239. 5. Robert Penn Warren, “Don’ts for Regionalists,” American Review 8 (1936): 150. I return briefly to the marketing of southern literature in my conclusion; see discussion below. 6. Baudrillard, “Precession of Simulacra,” 1. 7. Mason, In Country (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 19. 8. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 101–2. 9. Matthew Guinn, After Southern Modernism: Fiction of the Contemporary South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 59–60.

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10. The phrase appears throughout the advertisements for the Mitford series, first in the back matter of At Home in Mitford. 11. Jan Karon, At Home in Mitford (New York: Penguin, 1994), 272. Text hereafter cited parenthetically. 12. Michel de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 117. 13. Meanwhile, in the small town that “really is out there,” Blowing Rock depends heavily on tourism, hosting (among many other events) a Winterfest that ranks, according to the Southeast Tourism Society, as one of the “top 20 winter events in the southeast.” For a full discussion of Blowing Rock’s tourist attractions, see Lynne Wilbanks Jeter, “Finding Paradise in Blowing Rock: The Crown of the Blue Ridge Parkway,” South: Defining the Popular Culture (Winter 2004): 66–69. As Jeter notes, the most prominent store downtown is the Bob Timberlake Gallery on Main Street; Timberlake’s art (re-branded in numerous home furnishings, gifts, and collectibles) represents a southern variation on the Thomas Kincaid phenomenon. 14. In this particular, Karon reproduces the most famous jail in the history of the southern culture industry, the one in Andy Griffith’s Mayberry. Like The Andy Griffith Show, too, Karon’s Mitford series preserves its pastoral integrity by marginalizing African American characters. 15. Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 65. 16. Bobbie Ann Mason, Shiloh and Other Stories (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 3, 8, 3–4. Text hereafter cited parenthetically. 17. Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay, 1983), 130–33. 18. Hobson, Southern Writer, 81. 19. Guinn, After Southern Modernism, 59. 20. Mason, In Country, 226. 21. Stewart, On Longing, 56. 22. Again, we return to the function of the fetish as, in Henry Krips’s words, “a substitute for an object constituted retrospectively through the act of substitution” that, in turn, “creates the false impression that there was something . . . for which it acts as a substitute.” In this context, the difference between The Sixties Songbook and Tara is that the former can sustain neither libidinal investment nor desire. 23. See G. O. Morphew, “Downhome Feminists in Shiloh and Other Stories,” Southern Literary Journal 21 (1989): 41–49. For an exemplary reading of Mason’s feminist poetics, see Robert H. Brinkmeyer, “Finding One’s History: Bobbie Ann Mason and Contemporary Southern Literature,” Southern Literary Journal 19 (1987): 20–33. 24. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 21. 25. It is no accident that the photograph figures centrally in several stories, since Mason’s style, from its psychonarration to its narration of the event, aspires to a kind of photographic “objectivity,” thereby duplicating the depletion of aura Benjamin associated with photography as a mode of mechanical reproduction. In “Nancy Culpepper,” photographs concealed in the protagonist’s grandmother’s house signify an inaccessible archive, while Jack’s photographs in “Lying Doggo” are intentionally “vulnerable” images: “The image was meant to evoke its own death, he told her” (210). Perhaps most representative are the photographs in “Old Things,” which displace their referents as simulacra when Cleo “realize[s] that the memory of the snapshots [of her dead husband] is more real

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than the memory of his actual face” (89). Although I find no overarching pattern here, photography is generally framed as a mode of thwarted representation—that is to say, the image exists in unstable or anxious relation to its referent. 26. Baudrillard, “Precession of Simulacra,” 6–7. 27. Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (1939; New York: New Directions, 1969), 177, 177, 178. 28. Peter Burger, “The Negation of the Autonomy of Art by the Avant-Garde,” in Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. Thomas Docherty (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 240. Historically, Burger associates the collapse of art and life with the avant-gardist “negation of the autonomy of art,” but he notes the “contradictoriness” of this practice, since “in the meantime, the culture industry has brought about the false elimination of the distance between art and life” (240). Mason’s poetics, I suggest, reproduce this “false elimination” without coding it “false.” 29. Jameson, Postmodernism, 25, 51. 30. As Jon Smith observes, Jameson himself revisits the postmodern exceptionalism of Postmodernism (1991) in A Singular Modernity (2001) to consider the “return of old things.” See Smith, review of Postsouthern Sense of Place, by Martyn Bone. 31. Wayne Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 240–41. 32. Hugh Ruppersburg, “James Wilcox: The Normality of Madness,” in Southern Writers at Century’s End, ed. Jeffrey J. Folks and James A. Perkins (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 36. 33. Plain and Normal is one of Wilcox’s three novels set in New York City. 34. James Wilcox, North Gladiola (1985; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 97–98. Text hereafter cited parenthetically. 35. Jameson, Postmodernism, 17. 36. One contender for this title is Frederick Barthelme, whose work repeats key themes in both Mason and Wilcox. As Robert Brinkmeyer observes, Barthelme’s Gulf Coast landscape is populated by unremarkable characters who, “when they feel the need to search for the wondrous . . . [look] for it in the smallest details of the world around them—for instance, in glistening asphalt or in pork chops sizzling on the grill”; see Brinkmeyer, Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 95. Like Wilcox, Barthelme is especially interested in themed spaces—hotels, restaurants, apartment complexes, developments—as they precariously absorb subjective investment. Paradigmatic here is the drugstore in Two on One that, as one character puts it, is “really a fifties drugstore, but it’s pretending to be an eighties remake of a fifties drugstore.” See Barthelme, Two on One (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), 67. 37. Edward Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000), 150. 38. James Wilcox, Heavenly Days (New York: Viking, 2003), 68. Text hereafter cited parenthetically. 39. James Wilcox, Modern Baptists (1983; Boston: Little, Brown, 1999), 55, 121; Wilcox, Sort of Rich (1989; New York: Perennial Library, 1990), 107. 40. Wilcox, Modern Baptists, 9, 8. 41. Wilcox, Sort of Rich, 85, 82, 7, 51, 70, 4. 42. Wilcox, Modern Baptists, 67–68, 9. 43. Almost certainly Wilcox alludes here to Mencken’s celebrated philippic, “The Sahara of the Bozart” (1920). With the Pro Arts, Tula Springs constitutes an exception to Mencken’s rule that “if a stringed quartet is ever heard [in the South], the news of it has never come out.” Resonant is Mencken’s assertion that in the “second-rate” cities “between the Ohio and the Pacific,” the presence of

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such civilizing efforts, even as they fail or “succeed rather absurdly,” demonstrates “at least an impulse [to seek beauty] that deserves respect.” Similarly, I suggest, Wilcox balances the absurdity of Mrs. Coco’s cultural project with a respect for the impulse beneath it. Unfortunately, the Pro Arts are valued for reasons Mencken would have found characteristically southern. They are invited to perform at Dick’s China Nights, for example, because its manager “had read in a trade magazine that classical music stimulated the vagus nerve, so in the hopes of making people hungrier, he decided to give the Pro Arts a try” (82). So one form of instrumentalism gives way to another. 44. Wilcox, Modern Baptists, 209. 45. Wilcox, Sort of Rich, 229. 46. Mrs. Coco’s observation is reiterated throughout the Tula Springs novels. As a character in Heavenly Days observes, “this town ain’t made for walking.” Similarly, Gretchen Dambar is unable to “recall ever seeing many people walking,” pondering further that, “anthropologically speaking, there must be some significance to this.” See Heavenly Days, 84; Sort of Rich, 127. 47. Modern Baptists, 222; Sort of Rich, 137; Heavenly Days, 190. Dambar persistently maps Tula Springs as a colony in relation to her native New York metropolitan center. On one trip, “finding herself on streets she had never seen before,” even though Tula Springs is “no larger than some apartment complexes in New York,” she encounters on a single street an abrupt “transition from middle class to dirt poor . . . . as if a time warp had transported her from the fifties to the height of the Depression.” Immediately transposing the juxtaposition to her own pseudoscholarly work on the Philippines, she jots in her notebook, “A colony is always time warped” (105). 48. In Sort of Rich, Gretchen Dambar is similarly troubled by the brick façade of her house: “How anyone could feel right about living in a house that looked like brick but really wasn’t—and to think she hadn’t noticed how regular the bricks were, a dead giveaway” (48). 49. Lou’s repeated meditations on property values carries over to this house, located in a neighborhood where “prices had jumped a good 30 to 40 percent. Maybe even more because it was so close to the Wal-Mart Super Store, where you could buy quail eggs, bank, and get your hair permed all under one roof” (Heavenly Days 85). 50. Bauman, “From Pilgrim to Tourist,” 20, 23. 51. Bauman, “From Pilgrim to Tourist,” 24, 25, 23. 52. Bauman, “From Pilgrim to Tourist,” 19. 53. Wilcox, Sort of Rich, 65, 23. 54. Not all imitation recurs to literary models. In Modern Baptists, a “Polynesian-looking” nurse’s aid advises Bobby Pickens not to go to the police with news of his brother’s assault. Admonishing him to “keep mouth shut. Dukes of Huzza, they keep mouth shut” (168), the immigrant borrows from popular culture an ideal that the native is reluctant to practice. Unlike the Dukes of Huzza, Bobby squeals. 55. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 1–11. 56. The Bessie Building is noted for its “marble camel’s hitching posts,” traces of the “camels, imported by an enterprising young Yankee who thought they might be just the right sort of beast for Louisiana’s climate.” Unfortunately, the camels had “expired of disease and homesickness” (25). The language here is subtly inflected by Mrs. Coco’s sensibility (see discussion below), thus suggesting her (and the novel’s) concern with homesickness as a malady. Next door, as well as at (her) home, material traces of homesickness are legible. 57. Having to settle for publicity in the local press, the house’s “blue denim bathroom fixtures . . .

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had been written up last week in Mrs. Jenks’s society column” (138). Still, they disappoint at least one visitor, who “thought it meant they were made out of jeans or something” (139). As will by now be clear, decoration operates as a compromised but ubiquitous form of self-fashioning, here oriented particularly toward the simulacrum, since the Fitt home is also “distinguished by three trompe l’oeil dormers” (134). 58. In this context, North Gladiola offers an adumbrated version of a symptomatic plot that recurs in all the Tula Springs novels: the simulation of civil rights heroism on the part of a white character. Here the offender is Mrs. Coco’s acquaintance, Maud Herbert, whose quixotic mission is to protect the town’s “poor black women” who have “been treated very shabbily” (159) by the Mayor’s Citizen’s Patrol. Her mission terminates in a bizarre exoneration of the Citizen’s Patrol since one of the “poor black women,” she explains, had been drinking and “struck a gentleman from the CP with her purse” (211). The sim-civil rights plot is first enacted in Modern Baptists, by Donna Lee Keely, who complains that a neighbor won’t sign her “poor handyman” up for food stamps, even though he is “starving to death” (113). Donna Lee later learns that the handyman cannot eat because of a swollen heart; in the end, the neighbor cares for the handyman, while Donna Lee “never got around” to visiting him, despite recognizing that he was “lonely and in pain” (225). 59. Jonathan Matthew Schwartz, In Defense of Homesickness: Nine Essays on Identity and Locality (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1989), 32. 60. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 5. Somewhat speculatively, I suggest that Wilcox models Ray Jr. on the Deleuzian schizophrenic. Several details suggest Wilcox’s familiarity with Anti-Oedipus, among them the similarities between Ray Jr.’s experience of the sun hitting him like sharp leaves (see below) and Deleuze and Guattari’s repeated reference to Judge Schreber’s experience of God as he records it, often specifically as sunbeams, “on the surface of the body without organs.” See AntiOedipus, 11. 61. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 15, 13, 14. CHAPTER 6 1. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955; New York: Vintage, 1962), 87, 88, 94, 89. 2. Barry Hannah, Never Die, in Boomerang, Never Die: Two Novels by Barry Hannah (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 152. 3. Barry Hannah, Yonder Stands Your Orphan (New York: Grove, 2001), 46. Text hereafter cited parenthetically. 4. Barry Hannah, “Interview with Barry Hannah: February 6, 2001,” by Daniel E. Williams, Mississippi Quarterly 54.2 (2002): 263. 5. Richard H. King, A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930–1955 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), esp. 26–32. 6. In labeling Yonder Stands Your Orphan as post-Oedipal, I mean to indicate a transition from the kind of “anti-Freudian plots” in Hannah’s fiction described by James B. Potts, in which male characters “try to assert masculinity by mimicking larger-than-life figures, fearless, legendary figures such as Jeb Stuart (Airships), Hernando de Soto (Ray), and Geronimo (Geronimo Rex)” (238). In Yonder Stands Your Orphan, by contrast, the only quasi-Oedipal drama surrounds Sidney and Pepper Farté, “scions of a pusillanimous French line too lazy and ignorant to anglicize their name in a pleasant manner” (94). In this sense, the novel departs from what Ruth Weston identifies as the “perva-

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sive theme of initiation that accompanies the search for meaningful male adulthood in all of Barry Hannah’s stories.” See James B. Potts III, “Barry Hannah’s Anti-Myth Method: Anti-Freudian Plots and Fractured Fairy Tales,” Mississippi Quarterly 54.2 (2002): 238; Ruth Weston, Barry Hannah: Postmodern Romantic (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 60. 7. For a discussion of orphanhood as a trope by which female southern writers resisted the Oedipal dynamics of traditional southern culture, see Joan Schulz, “Orphaning as Resistance,” in The Female Tradition in Southern Literature, ed. Carol S. Manning (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 89–109. 8. The orphan’s camp reproduces the long-standing fascination of utopian experiments with altering or reproducing family structure, a history that includes Marx’s and Fourier’s nineteenthcentury attempts to detach sexual relations from marriage to more recent attempts to found new societies around a charismatic father figure. 9. This pattern is repeated throughout the text, notably in Melanie Wooten’s desire to turn John Roman into “Uncle Remus goes to war” (26). Here, as in Mortimer’s desire to figure himself as an object of nostalgia (see the discussion below), the commodification of human beings epitomizes the danger of “symbol” (26). 10. William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (New York: Random House, 1948), 125, 126. 11. Although Vicksburg figures centrally in Hannah’s “That Was Close, Ma,” where the narrator laments “Oh Vicksburg, Vicksburg! I am, personally, the fall of the West” (Bats 345), I suggest that Yonder Stands Your Orphan deviates from what might be labeled the Jeb Stuart syndrome. In this syndrome, the Civil War is deployed as a quasi-Oedipal scenario, often with explicit erotic overtones. In Yonder Stands Your Orphan, the Civil War locates not so much a personal psychodrama as a collective narrative of dispossession and anxiety, a quasi-elegiac scenario that reproduces the structure of the family romance in aligning imagined history with the surrogate, idealized parent. Here, the thwarted recovery is not of a gratifying, heroic, and essentially masculinist experience (see Bjerre), but of a shared social space, a Lost Cause terrain that evaporates under the pressures of what Vicksburg actually is in the novelistic present: an abject terrain of casino capitalism and pawn shop culture. See Hannah, Bats out of Hell (New York: Grove, 1994), 345; Thomas Ærvold Bjerre, “ ‘It was always life intense I was after’: Heroes, True and False, in Barry Hannah’s Fiction,” Mississippi Quarterly 54.2 (2001). 12. The third meditation on Vicksburg and the Civil War comes in Raymond’s poem, where he imaginatively participates in his forebears’ prayer to “give me Sherman, Grant or a lesser general”: “Ptoom and bummf, hit square. / This old mistress my rifle” (243). The poem goes on to imagine redemption in explicitly Christian terms, a shift that evacuates the redemptive potential of Mortimer and Booth’s “clean head shot” scenario. 13. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom, 139. 14. I should clarify this as an initial orientation, since position is finally what Mortimer does desire in his attempt to incarnate himself. Still, there is a crucial difference between Mortimer and precursor characters such as Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen and Snopeses or Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby in that these precursors are essentially conservative. Whereas the material self-objects of Faulkner’s and Fitzgerald’s characters are desired precisely because they are already valued by society, Mortimer’s self-objects are desirable because he desires them. The free-floating nature of such desire, I suggest, attunes him to the economy of consumption that lacks a stable social grid. 15. The logic of Mortimer’s maiming follows what Elaine Scarry calls analogical verification, wherein the “sheer material factualness of the human body will be borrowed to lend” cultural con-

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structs whose self-evident status has deteriorated “the aura of ‘realness’ and ‘certainty.’ ” Mortimer’s perverse attempt to verify himself through the painful mutilation of bodily surfaces inverts the logic of the pornographic economy he commands, wherein the materiality of the body is reduced to pleasurable visual surfaces. See Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 14. 16. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957; New York: Atheneum, 1968), 169. 17. Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 65, 71. 18. Throughout Hannah’s fiction, the treatment of animals serves as an ethical centrifuge dividing those who kick dogs and those who pet dogs. A humane regard for animals thus acts as an criterion of humanity itself, violated by both the excessively refined (Jeb Stuart in “Dragged Fighting from His Tomb,” who counsels Captain Howard to “use your weeping on people, not on animals” [Airships 54]) and the excessively brutal (“some blacks” and “white country people” who torture dogs in Boomerang [39], thereby signaling some innate human depravity). In The Seeds of Time, Jameson diagnoses the essentialist “ecological recovery of a sense of Nature” as existing in an antinomic relation with the antifoundationalist assumptions of postmodernity; see 32–52, and especially 46. Hannah reproduces, I suggest, something of this antinomy in deploying Nature both as an index of cultural pathology and as a potential “solution” that gestures opaquely toward the utopian. 19. Jean Baudrillard, “The Animals: Territory and Metamorphosis,” in Simulacra and Simulation, 137. 20. The formal problem of incarnation is doubled negatively in the figure of Mortimer, who is simultaneously the object of a nihilistic discourse (in which he is an empty “nullity”) and an essentialist one (in which he incarnates evil). 21. Jameson, Seeds of Time, 36. 22. Roland Barthes, “Authors and Writers,” in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 188. 23. Hannah, “Interview,” 262, 263. 24. The prologue, which apparently takes place after the events of the last chapter, indicates the spatial limitations of the resolution, since there, as we have seen, an economy of nostalgia and pornography still operates. 25. Jan Norby Gretlund, Frames of Southern Mind: Reflections on the Stoic, Bi-Racial, and Existential South (Odense: Odense University Press, 1998), 224. 26. Josephine Humphreys, Rich in Love (1987; New York: Penguin, 1992), 1. Text hereafter cited parenthetically. 27. Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature, 116, 118. Kreyling, I think, fails to sustain two irreconcilable narratives, on the one hand arguing that Lucille (in contrast to Walker Percy’s narrators) “successfully” “organize[s] an identity” by refusing to “become paralyzed” in the modern South’s “tourist pageant,” and on the other, arguing that Lucille “would reverse this fakery, if she could.” As I will argue, Lucille’s orientation toward “fakery” constitutes in part the paralysis that she must overcome, as does her fetishistic attitude toward the real and the enclave, where, according to Kreyling, Lucille actually lives: “Lucille . . . lives in an enclave of the authentic, Mount Pleasant, the only ‘remnant’ of the real left in the boondoggle of the new.” See Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature, 117. 28. Žižek, Plague of Fantasies, 13. 29. Josephine Humphreys, Dreams of Sleep (New York: Viking, 1984), 30. Text hereafter cited parenthetically. 30. In The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World, Fred Hobson observes a tendency in contemporary

Notes to Pages 214–228

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southern fiction to “pok[e] fun at Ohio” as having “too much sameness”—as epitomizing, in other words, the bland American norm against which the South defines itself. To Hobson’s tongue-incheek classification of Dreams of Sleep in “the Ohio-Bashing School of Southern Fiction,” I would, as my reading suggests, locate the novel within the “Ohio-Bashing-Bashing School of Southern Fiction.” See Hobson, Southern Writer, 50. 31. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 292. 32. “Living in the Past,” Southern Living 35.4 (April 2000): 26. 33. Shelly M. Jackson, “Josephine Humphreys and the Politics of Postmodern Desire,” Mississippi Quarterly 47.2 (1994): 282. For Lucille, the habituated, everyday equivalent of buried language is the cliché, to which she “pay[s] attention . . . because they are likely to be true. Otherwise they wouldn’t have achieved cliché status” (31). What connects the cliché and the etymology, besides their equivalence in producing order, is that Lucille has special, private access to them—through attentiveness and digging, respectively—unlike those around her. One effect of this attitude toward language is Lucille’s privatization of speech itself: “My natural language was all private. What came out when I spoke was only a hacked-up version of the thoughts that lay graceful and complete in my brain” (36). 34. For Warren, too, attitudes toward space absorb the psychological conflict of a family drama, since the “old main street” clearly absorbs his own traumatic register of his mother’s material deprivation and psychological decay (95). 35. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 7. 36. In his analysis of the nostalgia film, Jameson calls attention to the genre’s reduction of historicity to “glossy qualities,” as when “ ‘1930s-ness’ or ‘1950s-ness’ ” is conveyed “by the attributes of fashion.” The inability of such cultural production “to gaze directly on some putative real world” represents, for Jameson, an acute “crisis in historicity.” See Postmodernism, 19, 25. 37. One irony of this scene is that when Lucille attempts to script her insight by having Rae and Billy join her in exercise, she is frustrated because they are engaged in the “exercise” of sexual intercourse. CHAPTER 7 1. Padgett Powell, Edisto (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983), 129, 132, 130, 133. 2. Powell, Edisto, 177, 181. 3. Jameson, Postmodernism, 38. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1983), 58. Within the Sprawl (or “BAMA,” for “Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis”) the virtual residues of earlier material Souths are legible in data-exchange cartographies that preserve “outlines of hundredyear-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta”; see 43. 4. Carlton Riley Smith, “From Real to Virtual and Back Again,” Southern Living 39.3 (March 2004): 206. 5. Shawn Wilbur, “An Archaeology of Cyberspaces: Virtuality, Community, Identity,” in Internet Culture, ed. David Porter (New York: Routledge, 1997), 5; Daniel Punday, “The Narrative Construction of Cyberspace: Reading Neuromancer, Reading Cyberspace Debates,” College English 63.2 (November 2000): 194. A strong version of this thesis would be that the identities and cultures operative at the end of the twentieth century will effectively be fixed in a kind of informational amber, preserved in perpetuity precisely because they originally served to manage information overload, organizing the explosion of data that otherwise would have been merely explosive.

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6. Baudrillard, “Precession,” 2. 7. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 289. 8. Jeri Rowe, “Southern Tales Stem from ‘Jaw-Wagging Tradition,’ ” Greensboro News and Record, 21 September 2006: B1, B10. 9. Jennifer Fernandez, “Leaders to Visit Mexico to Learn,” Greensboro News and Record, 21 September 2006: B1, B10. 10. Baudrillard, “Precession,” 6. 11. Rodger Lyle Brown, Ghost Dancing on the Cracker Circuit: The Culture of Festivals in the American South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 184, 192, 192. 12. Apter, “Introduction,” 3. 13. Ayers, “What We Talk about,” 69. 14. Davidson, “Gulliver with Hay Fever,” 152, 154, 153. 15. McGill’s utopian prediction interestingly reworks Davidson’s anxieties over the TVA project and its disruption of folk culture. According to McGill, “Everything’s gonna be put on electricity and run on a paying basis. Out with the old spiritual mumbo jumbo, the superstitions, and the backward ways. We’re gonna see a brave new world, where they run everybody a wire and hook us all up to a grid. Yessir, a veritable Age of Reason, like the one they had in France.” Empirically, Davidson would accept this account almost verbatim, although his attitude toward it would be, of course, quite different. See O Brother, Where Art Thou? directed by Ethan and Joel Coen, Touchstone Pictures, 2000. 16. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 99. 17. Maria Lauret, “ ‘I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Blues’: Alice Walker’s Aesthetic,” in Dixie Debates, ed. King and Taylor, 63. 18. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 141. 19. Susan V. Donaldson, “Masters, Slaves, and the ‘Mind of the South,’ ” Mississippi Quarterly 58.1 (2004–05): 198; Michael O’Brien, “Response to My Critics,” Mississippi Quarterly 58.1 (2004– 05): 211. 20. McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie, 30. In her wide-ranging study of the racial dynamics of recent southern fiction, Suzanne Jones offers a similar argument, suggesting “not only that race relations and constructions of racial identity must be rethought, but that new narratives of race relations, perhaps these very stories, are necessary for reading race anew.” See Race Mixing, 15.

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Index Abernathy, Jeff, 152 Adorno, Theodor, 2, 12, 25, 65 Agrarians (Nashville), 4–6, 14, 241n32. See also Davidson, Donald; Ransom, John Crowe; Warren, Robert Penn Aldama, Frederick Luis, 123–24 Anderson, Benedict, 15, 65 Appadurai, Arjun, 15, 47, 48; on cultural identity, 26, 65–66, 105–6, 228; and imagination, 11, 26, 222, 239n2; and locality, 58–59, 246n56 Appiah, K. Anthony, 64–66, 70, 102, 103, 107, 230 “Appropriation of Cultures, The” (Everett), 115–17, 251n45 Apter, Emily, 28, 36, 233 Artificial territoriality, 9, 12, 27, 24, 157, 174, 195–96, 198–200, 229; and Tara, 27, 29–31, 37, 43 At Home in Mitford (Karon), 157–61, 257n10, 257n14 Atavism, 22, 31, 49, 106–8, 121, 123, 220, 235; in Confederates in the Attic, 61, 67, 70, 76; in A Turn in the South, 61, 84, 93, 96 Aura, 1, 12, 46–47, 59, 80, 110, 113, 117, 129, 177, 229, 234, 251n36, 257n25, 262n15 Authenticity: and absence, 3, 4, 9–10, 156, 169; and advertising, 4, 110; and coercion, 14, 98, 241n31; desirability of, 2, 116–17, 198–99, 230, 235; and folk culture, 65, 92–93, 98–99, 122, 129, 235; and identity, 66, 98, 100, 106–7, 235; and Mama Dip’s Kitchen, 108–10, 112–14; and material objects, 48, 106, 215; and music, 93, 234; and place, 19, 60, 210, 212, 217, 226; and pragmatism, 10, 13, 106; rhetoric of, 62, 234–36; as social tool, 10, 13–14, 20–21, 106, 229, 235; and U.S. South, 3, 5, 9–10, 100, 103 Ayers, Edward L., 9, 233

Baker, Houston A., Jr., 86, 99–100, 103, 114 Baldwin, James, 87, 134 Barthelme, Frederick, 258n36 Barthes, Roland, 26, 207, 254n20 Baudrillard, Jean, 4, 79, 109, 136, 141, 146, 162, 169, 229–30; on animals, 205; on ethnology, 92, 248n49, 252n56; on Gulf War, 168, 243n1; on interiority, 162; on mapping, 155; on simulacrum, 122, 232, 254n18 Bauman, Zygmunt, 3, 10–11, 182–83, 187 Benjamin, Walter, 1–2, 110, 167, 177, 237, 239n2, 257n25 Benson, Melanie R., 243n13 Bhabha, Homi K., 130 Bishop, Elizabeth, 19 Bone, Martyn, 7, 30–31, 44, 242n48, 244n30, 247n25 Booth, Wayne, 175 Bradbury, Malcolm, 94 Brinkmeyer, Robert H., 155, 257n23, 258n36 Brodhead, Richard, 111 Brooks, Peter, 24 Brown, Rodger Lyle, 232–33 Burger, Peter, 174, 258n28 Burns, Ken, 79 Butler, Jack, 137 Byer, Kathryn Stripling, 53–55. See also “Gone Again” Cable, Pamela, 246n Carby, Hazel V., 99, 129 Cartwright, Keith, 122, 129 Cash, W. J., 24, 82–83, 103, 104 Certeau, Michel de, 67, 158, 180 Chafe, William H., 255n33 Chappell, Fred, 19–21, 23, 242nn44–45. See also Look Back All the Green Valley Chidester, David, 240n21

280

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Childress, Mark, 131–32, 253n1. See also Crazy in Alabama Chow, Rey, 136 Classen, Steven D., 16 Cobb, James C., 5 Coca-Cola, 27, 29, 43–44, 69–70, 86, 240n21, 241n34, 243n1, 256n30 Cohn, Deborah, 85, 155 Confederacy of Dunces, A (Toole), 44–46 Confederates in the Attic (Horwitz), 25, 61–64, 66–81, 168, 247n31, 247n33, 247n36; atavism in, 61, 67, 70, 76; Atlanta in, 69–71, 74, 78; Civil War reenactment in, 68, 72–73, 76, 78; globalization and, 62, 67, 70, 80; memory in, 67–68, 70–72, 77–79, 248n37 Connor, Stephen, 9, 49, 220 Contact zone, 62–64, 100, 115, 129, 234 Costello, Brannon, 255n30 Council, Mildred (Mama Dip), 109, 111–14 Crazy in Alabama (Childress), 131–32, 253n1 Cultural reproduction, 1–2, 11, 13–15, 19, 21, 26, 57, 62, 66–67, 100, 110, 137, 229, 233–34; in Daughters of the Dust, 124, 127–28; in “Everyday Use,” 117–18; in Gone with the Wind, 27, 39, 43–44; and narrative, 23, 25; in A Turn in the South, 85, 90–91, 93, 97 Culture industry, 2, 6, 12–13, 30, 46, 104, 136, 156, 162, 253n, 257n, 258n28 Cunningham, Rodger, 242n46 Dash, Julie, 120, 122–30, 156. See also Daughters of the Dust Dash, Michael, 17, 24, 134, 234 Daughters of the Dust (film; Dash), 122–30, 168, 252n59, 253nn61–63, 253n66; material objects in, 125, 127, 129, 253n60; space in, 125, 128–30; special effects in, 123– 24, 126–28; trauma in, 124–25, 128 Daughters of the Dust (novel; Dash), 123, 252n56 Davidson, Donald (Agrarian), 6, 24, 134, 234, 264n15 Davidson, Donald (Pragmatist), 13–14 Davis, Fred, 243n6 Davis, Thadious, 102–5, 249n12

Deleuze, Gilles, 12, 29–30, 188–89, 195, 229, 260n60 Desmond, John, 43–44 Deterritorialization, 9, 15, 17, 22, 84, 103, 108, 111, 154, 178, 222; and capitalism, 12, 229; and media, 15, 17, 63; in Shiloh and other Stories, 155–56, 161, 166, 174; in Yonder Stands Your Orphan, 194–95, 200–202 Disney, 1, 4, 22–23, 26, 57, 67, 79, 108, 219, 229 Disneyfication, 18, 67, 108, 212, 229 Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (Wells), 244n30 Donaldson, Susan V., 235–36 Douglas, Mary, 138, 254n22 Downs, Robert, 61 Dreams of Sleep (Humphreys), 211–13, 226, 262n30 Duck, Leigh Anne, 90–95, 99, 244n24, 248n48 Edgerton, Clyde, 153–55 Edisto (Powell), 226–27 Egerton, John, 1–2, 71 Elias, Amy, 249n12 Ellison, Ralph, 251n34 Entzminger, Betina, 44 Erasure (Everett), 117 Erskine, Jim, 250n29 Everett, Percival, 115–17. See also “The Appropriation of Cultures”; Erasure “Everyday Use” (Walker), 117–20, 123, 252n50 Fabian, Johannes, 23 Faulkner, William, 3, 26, 37, 68, 134–36, 147, 149, 153–55, 158, 198, 232, 255n37, 256n40, 261n14 Favor, J. Martin, 98–99 Feld, Steven, 93 Fetish/fetishism, 65, 72, 86, 118–19, 121–22, 127, 195, 209, 212, 226, 233, 240n21, 243n14, 244n30 ; and Tara, 28–30, 33–36, 39–41, 49–50, 52, 56, 59; and Mama Dip’s Kitchen, 106, 110, 113; in Shiloh and other Stories, 162, 166, 168–69 Fiedler, Leslie A., 35

Index Fishman, Robert, 56 Food: in At Home in Mitford, 159–60; as cultural commodity, 19, 230, 250n28; and Mama Dip’s Kitchen, 109–12, 114; and multicultural South, 230; in Shiloh and other Stories, 169; Slow Food movement, 251n33; soul food, 111–12; 251n34; in A Turn in the South, 85–86, 90–91, 94; in Yonder Stands Your Orphan, 197–98 Fossett, Judith Jackson, 103 Franklin, Tom, 60–61. See also Poachers Frye, Northrop, 203 Fuentes, Carlos, 136, 147 Garreau, Joel, 27 Gibson, William, 227, 263n3 Giddens, Anthony, 107, 250n25 Gilroy, Paul, 235 Girard, René, 184–85 Glissant, Edouard, 82, 84, 106–8, 121, 234– 35, 248n40, 248n47 Globalization, 1, 4, 67, 70, 80, 85, 93, 109, 111, 228 Godden, Richard, 154, 156 Gods Must be Crazy, The (film), 241n34 “Gone Again” (Byer), 53–55 Gone with the Wind (Mitchell), 27–44, 46, 49–50, 54–55, 57, 61–62, 122, 160, 243n13; economy in, 30–36, 244n24; fetish in, 28–30, 33–34, 35–36, 39–41, 243n8; labor in, 31, 37–38, 40; land in, 37–38, 41–42; nostalgia in, 28–30, 33, 40; “old days” in, 30, 34, 39–42 Gretlund, Jan Norby, 209 Grimshaw, James A., Jr., 154 Guattari, Félix, 12, 29–30, 188–89, 195, 229 Guinn, Matthew, 156, 162 Gurganus, Allan, 231 Halberstam, David, 133, 254n5 Hale, Grace Elizabeth, 57–58 Haley, Alex, 15, 102, 120–23, 127. See also Roots Hall, Stuart, 107–8 Hannah, Barry, 61, 69, 156, 192–208, 232. See also Never Die; Yonder Stands Your Orphan

281

Harvey, David, 3–4, 24, 111, 214, 229–30 Heavenly Days (Wilcox), 177, 179, 181–82, 259n46, 259n49 Hellman, David, 61 Henninger, Katherine, 123, 126 Hirsch, Marianne, 71 Hobsbawm, Eric, 107 Hobson, Fred, 23, 162, 242n44, 249n8, 262–63n30 Horkheimer, Max, 24, 65 Horwitz, Tony, 10, 25, 27–28, 61–64, 66– 81, 86, 89, 156, 179. See also Confederates in the Attic Howell, Signe, 14–15, 250n25 Humphreys, Josephine, 5, 156, 204, 208–26. See also Dreams of Sleep; Rich in Love Humphries, Jefferson, 245n33 Huyssen, Andreas, 3, 25, 67, 109 Imagined geography, 1, 12, 23–24, 129, 155, 167, 212, 221, 228, 236, 242n46 In Country (Mason), 156, 164 Jackson, Shelly M., 217 Jameson, Fredric, 7, 9, 26, 38, 167, 174, 190, 207, 219, 222, 230, 262n18, 263n36; on authenticity, 4, 108, 229; on cultural stigmata, 64–65, 71, 254n20; modularity in, 4, 59, 239n6; on pastiche, 176; on property, 37, 41–42, 49, 59; on utopianism, 23, 145–46 Johnson, Gerald, 70 Jones, Anne Goodwyn, 42, 101–2, 103, 252n50 Jones, Lisa, 111–12 Jones, Suzanne W., 256n48, 264n20 Karon, Jan, 153, 155, 157–61, 177, 180, 190, 231, 257n10, 257n14. See also At Home in Mitford Kembell, Fanny, 61, 64, 92 Kenan, Randall, 136, 150–53. See also “Let the Dead Bury Their Dead” King, Edward, 61 King, Richard H., 35, 194

282

index

Kreyling, Michael, 5–6, 9, 100–105, 210, 249n8, 262n27 Krips, Henry, 28–29, 160, 257n22 Kristeva, Julia, 142–43 “Late Encounter with the Enemy, A” (O’Connor), 43–44, 244n30 Late South, 2, 9–11, 15–17, 24, 62, 64, 103, 107–8, 154–55, 175–76, 210, 220, 229, 231–36 Lauret, Maria, 235 Lefebvre, Henri, 111, 129, 154, 156, 176 “Let the Dead Bury Their Dead” (Kenan), 150–52 “Letter of the Times, A” (Walker), 52–53, 55 Levenson, Jacob, 133, 253–54n4 Levitas, Ruth, 256n38 Look Back All the Green Valley (Chappell), 19–22, 242n44 Love in the Ruins (Percy), 46–49, 57 Lukács, Georg, 26, 149, 161, 204–5, 207 Lyotard, Jean-François, 16, 119, 239n11 Mama Dip’s Kitchen (cookbook), 109, 112–13 Mama Dip’s Kitchen (restaurant), 10, 108–15, 179 Man in Full, A (Wolfe), 21–23 Marcuse, Herbert, 192, 194 Marx, Karl, 8–9, 14, 28, 33, 52, 152, 243n14, 261n8 Mason, Bobbie Ann, 153, 155–57, 161–76, 180, 186, 195, 224, 230. See also In Country; Shiloh and other Stories Matrix, The (film), 138, 141, 247n33, 254–55n23 McFarland, James, 94 McPherson, Tara, 17, 36–38, 42, 55, 94, 105, 114, 236 Mechanical reproduction, 1–2, 4, 12, 33, 59, 91, 129, 162, 166, 169, 177, 237; Benjamin on, 1–2, 110, 237; and Mama Dip’s Kitchen, 110, 112–13 Media, 2, 11, 15–17, 80, 104–5, 112, 192, 222, 228; in Crazy in Alabama, 131; and Mama Dip’s Kitchen, 111; in Shiloh and other Stories, 156, 158; in A Turn in the South, 63–64, 93–94, 96; in Wolf Whistle, 133–35

Michaels, Walter Benn, 10, 66, 240n22 Mitchell, Margaret, 26–43, 46, 49–50, 56– 57, 122, 156, 162. See also Gone with the Wind Modern Baptists (Wilcox), 174, 177–79, 259n54, 260n58 Moore, David Chioni, 120, 252n54 Morphew, G. O., 167 Nabokov, Vladimir, 3 Naipaul, V. S., 29, 61–64, 66, 81–97, 133, 156. See also A Turn in the South Neely, Carol Thomas, 33, 39 Neuromancer (Gibson), 227–28, 263n3 Never Die (Hannah), 192–93 Nordan, Lewis, 133–53, 234. See also Wolf Whistle North Gladiola (Wilcox), 175–77, 179–80, 183– 91, 258n43, 259–60nn56–58; exile in, 184–85; homecoming in, 187–91; schizophrenia in, 188–89, 260n60 Nostalgia, 9, 25, 78, 80, 99, 155, 159, 229– 30, 239n11, 243n6, 254n4; in Gone with the Wind, 28–30, 33, 40; in Rich in Love, 213, 219; in Roots, 121–22, 130; in Shiloh and other Stories, 169–70; in Yonder Stands Your Orphan, 198–200, 202–4 O Brother, Where Art Thou? 231, 234, 264n15 O’Brien, Michael, 103, 235–36 Odum, Howard W., 103–4, 250n17 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 61 Percy, Walker, 46–49, 57, 201, 245n34. See also Love in the Ruins Pietz, William, 29 Pitts, Leonard, 98–99 Poachers (Franklin), 60–61 Potts, James B., 260–61n6 Powell, Padgett, 226–27. See also Edisto Pratt, Mary Louise, 62–64, 235 Punday, Daniel, 228 Pyron, Darden Asbury, 245n51 Randall, Alice, 42, 49–52, 245n41. See also The Wind Done Gone Ranger, Terrence O., 107 Ransom, John Crowe, 5

Index Reed, John Shelton, 69, 241n32 Reid-Pharr, Robert, 98 Rich in Love (Humphreys) 5–6, 192, 208–25, 263n34, 263n37; decorating in, 210, 213–16, 223; desire in, 220–24; habitat in, 209–11, 213–14, 217–18, 222, 224; language in, 217–18, 224, 263n33; nostalgia in, 213, 219; simulacra in, 210, 219, 262n27; tourism in, 210, 218–20 Ripley, Alexandra, 49–50. See also Scarlett Roberts, Diane, 14–15, 249n12 Romine, Scott, 16, 239–40n11, 255n37 Roots (Haley), 10, 15, 120–23, 129, 252nn54–55 Rorty, Richard, 13, 237 Rowe, Jeri, 231–32 Ruppersburg, Hugh, 175–76 Rutheiser, Charles, 69 Sacks, Howard L., 251n45 Said, Edward, 24–25 Scarlett (Ripley), 49–50 Scarry, Elaine, 261–62n15 Schulz, Joan, 261n7 Schwartz, Jonathan Matthew, 188 Shiloh and Other Stories (Mason), 156–57, 161–75, 257n25; food in, 169; home in, 161–62, 165–67, 169–72; mass culture in, 162, 168–71; narrative style, 161, 163–65, 174–75, 258n28 Shklar, Judith N., 256n38 Simpson, Lewis P., 5, 7 Singleton, George, 13, 153, 246n2 Slow Food movement, 251n33 Smart-Grosvenor, Vertamae, 112–13 Smith, Jon, 7, 12, 13–14, 17, 105, 240n14, 258n30 Soja, Edward, 177 Sollers, Werner, 15 Sommer, Doris, 71–72 Sort of Rich (Wilcox), 178–80, 259nn46–48 Southern Living Magazine, 14–16, 60, 62, 111, 159, 187, 216–17, 228, 232, 249n12 Stack, Carol, 99–100 Starr, Kathy, 112–13 Stewart, Susan, 110, 166 Stock, Alice Demetrius, 112

283

Tara—A Country Inn, 55–56, 59, 245n46 Tara Club Estates, 56–59, 111, 246n56 Taste of the South Magazine, 250n28 Tate, Allen, 9, 107, 239n11 Taylor, Helen, 17, 29, 134 Territoriality/territorialization, 8, 14, 24, 29, 60, 84, 86, 93, 97, 108, 125, 130, 147, 155, 160, 212, 228, 230, 233, 237; in “The Appropriation of Cultures,” 115–17; and black South, 99, 102–6; in Roots, 122– 23; in The Wind Done Gone, 50–52; in Yonder Stands Your Orphan, 192–94, 207, 212 Themed space, 5, 17, 21, 22–25, 155, 193, 242n54, 258n36; in At Home in Mitford, 157, 160; in Love in the Ruins, 48; and Mama Dip’s Kitchen, 109–11, 114; in Rich in Love, 222; and Tara, 27, 42; and Tara Club Estates, 57; in Wilcox’s fiction, 157, 179–81, 185; in Yonder Stands Your Orphan, 198, 202 Thornton, J. Mills, III, 132 Time-space compression, 3–4, 8–9, 62, 79– 80, 96, 111, 155, 214; and home, 24, 214; as threat, 4, 82, 157 Time-space decompression, 9, 62, 96, 251n33 Time-space fusion, 23–24, 232 Tolson, Jay, 46, 245n34 Toole, John Kennedy, 44–46. See also A Confederacy of Dunces Tourism, 4, 5, 21, 28, 43, 68, 109, 130, 170, 178, 180, 194, 211; in At Home in Mitford, 158–59, 257n13; in A Confederacy of Dunces, 44–45; in Heavenly Days, 181–82; as industry, 17–19, 28–29, 179; and narrative, 62–64; in North Gladiola, 175–76, 179–80, 183, 190–91; in Rich in Love, 210, 213, 218–19; and Tara, 30, 42, 55–56; in “ThreeDay Weekend,” 17–19; in A Turn in the South, 84–85, 91, 105 Tradition, 1–2, 101, 234; authenticity of, 9–10, 13, 14–15, 49, 107; commodification of, 108–10, 112, 114, 129, 179, 231, 250n25; defense of, 5–6, 9, 124, 231; liquidation of, 1–2, 110, 167, 232–33, 237; narrative structure of, 6, 13, 231; uses of, 13, 107, 114, 232–33 Trescot, William Henry, 8, 240n15

284

index

Turn in the South, A (Naipaul), 61–64, 66, 81–97, 248n44, 248n47; atavism in, 61, 84, 93, 96; Caribbean in, 83–85, 88, 90, 92; frontier in, 81–83, 91–92, 95; layer metaphor in, 62, 83, 85, 89, 96; media in, 63–64, 93, 94–96; music in, 89–90, 93–94; plantation in, 62, 81–86, 89– 91, 95, 97, 248n44; redneck in, 90–95, 248n48; as travel narrative, 63–66, 91–92 Turner South cable channel, 16–19, 60–61, 80, 247n32 Urgo, Joseph R., 153 Utopia/utopianism, 23–25, 47, 56, 70, 114, 120, 122, 132, 156, 169, 256n38, 264n15; in Daughters of the Dust, 125–27; in Gone with the Wind, 27, 31, 33, 39; in Wolf Whistle, 137, 140, 144–47, 149, 152; in Yonder Stands Your Orphan, 193, 207–8, 261n8 Walker, Alice 42–43, 49, 52–55, 117–20, 123, 252n. See also “Everyday Use”; “A Letter of the Times” Wal-Mart, 240n14, 243n1, 259n49 Warren, Robert Penn, 154 Weinstein, Philip, 135, 147, 256n40 Weiss, Gail, 144 Wells, Paul, 68 Wells, Rebecca, 244n30. See also Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood Weston, Ruth, 260–61n6 Wilbur, Shawn, 228 Wilcox, James, 153, 155–57, 174–91. See also

Heavenly Days; Modern Baptists; North Gladiola; Sort of Rich Williams, Linda, 121–22, 131, 136, 146, 252n54, 254n4 Williams, Raymond, 64, 157 Wind Done Gone, The (Randall), 49–52 Witt, Doris, 110, 114, 251n34 Wolf Whistle (Nordan), 133–52, 234, 255n31, 256n48; excrement in, 137–39; humor in, 137, 139–40, 142–43, 255n27; hypertype in, 136–37, 141; magic in, 135, 143–49; media in, 133–35; trauma in, 137, 139, 142–44, 146–49, 255n29; utopianism in, 140, 144–49 Wolfe, Tom, 21–22, 242n48 Yaeger, Patricia, 22–23, 109, 114, 150, 152, 197 Yoder, Edwin M., 1–2 Yonder Stands Your Orphan (Hannah), 69, 192–208, 232, 260n6, 261–62nn14–15, 262n20; animals in, 204–5, 262n18; Civil War in, 198–99, 261nn11–12; economy in, 193–95, 197–99, 201–2, 207; food in, 197–98; homesickness in, 192–97, 207; music in, 205–6; nostalgia in, 198–200, 202–4, 261n9, 262n24; pornography in, 193, 199–201, 204, 208, 262n24; speech in, 204–8 Žižek, Slavoj, 138, 142, 147, 201, 210–11, 224, 247n35; and fetishism, 28, 30, 36, 40, 166; and narrative, 6–7, 77, 235; and tradition, 6, 107