Jane Smiley's Divell Theorie

Abstract

ARTICLE Jane Smiley's Divell Theorie___________ Rodger Cunningham One of the latest and ugliest examples of the mainstream media's endless trashing of Appalachian people is a blog (a comment on a website set up to encourage public input) by Jane Smiley—a novelist whose books I used to enjoy—on the Huffington Post for December 29, 2006. Smiley wants us all to read her "most informative book of 2006," one that, gee, explains America for her. And this revelatory masterpiece is David Hackett Fischer's 1989 Albion's Seed. In that book, Fischer posited Anglo-American culture as consisting of four regional cultures descended from four regional British cultures: the Puritans from East Anglia to New England and thence the Northern Tier; the Cavaliers from the West Country to Virginia and thence the Deep South; the Quakers from the North Midlands to Pennsylvania and thence the Midwest; and the Scots-Irish from North Britain and Ulster to Appalachia and thence the Upper South. And, says Smiley, aha! This is the explanation for what she'd previously called "the unteachable ignorance of the red states." The mess we're in now is all because those nassty, mean, eeevil Scots-Irish have taken over the Republican Party and are using it as a weapon against "us" sweetly reasonable Quaker-descended liberals. Her posting brought a spirited rejoinder from Aaron Barlow of the New York City College of Technology, which in turn stimulated a lively exchange when it was picked up on another blog-site, Daily Kos. Which is where I come in. I happen to be a scholar of Appalachia and the Scots-Irish, and I reviewed Albion's Seed for Appalachian Journal and then debated Fischer face-to-face with three other Appalachian and Scottish scholars (Gordon McKinney of Berea College, Edward J. Cowan ofthe University ofGlasgow, andAltinaWallerofthe University of Connecticut) at the 1991 Appalachian Studies Conference. I'm also a seventh-generation Appalachian whose family arrived in West Virginia in 1752 from Ireland. I was moved to write a letter to Barlow and to one of his DiCos commenters, and that letter has become this essay, which will appear both in Appalachian Heritage and on ePluribus Media Journal. First, since neither Smiley nor any of her blog commentators 65 seem aware of what Fischer's colleagues (as distinct from newsmag reviewers) think about him, let me say that Albion's Seed, though physically imposing and impressive to the layman (and valid and important for its basic layout of the four cultures—at least 7 think so), is not often considered his best book. For one thing, it's just not very historical—it doesn't really explain the cultures in question as a result of actual historical processes, especially in any sense a progressive would recognize. Furthermore, as both Gordon McKinney and Altina Waller point out, his sources on the "Border" culture are in general much older than those for his other three cultures and, unlike them, include virtually nothing written from the inside of it. It certainly includes very little Appalachian scholarship since 1970. Moreover, the language he uses to describe his cultures is loaded in a way that's obvious to anyone not a member of his favorite one, the Quakers. As Waller says, it's obvious who it's most loaded against, too. Finally, he discusses his four cultures largely in isolation from one another, without seriously discussing the historic and economic relations among them that helped to form them and that to some extent were reproduced in America and continue to operate. "They do not understand us and we do not understand them," Smiley says. Well, the latter is certainly true. ("Understand one another?" said J. R. R. Tolkein's Gandalf. "I fear I am beyond your comprehension. But you, Saruman, I understand now too well.") Rather than claim that Fischer's stereotypes (or rather Smiley's stereotypes based on Fischer's generalizations) are totally unfounded, as some critics have, I'd rather accept that they have a validity as (over)generalizations about (misunderstood) behavior, and then try to contribute to better understanding of that behavior. To begin with, as Edward Cowan notes, Fischer's...