Strange Bedfellows: Randall Kenan Talks Back to the Southern Renaissance

Abstract

his book Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction, 1936-1961, Gary Richards tackles the controversy surrounding the termination of the Southern Renaissance. As Richards explains, authors and scholars debate various dates, most agreeing on 1945, 1950, and 1955. By this latest date, Agrarian poets John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate had stopped publishing verse, and Thomas Wolfe and James Agee had died. According to critic Richard King, William Faulkner had by 1955 exhausted his genius as a novelist, and Robert Penn Warren never again regained the heights of All the Kings Men' (3), which he published in 1946. By King's estimation, apogee had been reached; the Renaissance had become a (3). As same-sex desire became an increasingly central theme in work published after 1955, the issue appears to be one of exclusion, whether to canonize, and, thus, officially acknowledge the art of known and suspected sexual transgressives or, as Richards argues, to preserve the largely patriarchal, hetero-dominant tradition of southern letters by quarantining ... same sex desire ... just as [Truman] Capote, [William] Goyen, and [Tennessee] Williams were establishing their significance (19). By hands unforeseen and mostly unwanted, a page in the story of the American South had turned. While the post-Agrarian work of Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, and Truman Capote would indeed eclipse in popularity the literature of John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, if not that of Robert Penn Warren, the border between the Renaissance proper and the period that immediately followed remained a permeable one. Representations of wasted southern landscapes and aristocratic families suffering swift, conspicuous decline, which recur throughout Faulkner's novels, specifically The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and The Unvanquished, published between 1929 and 1934, reappear in Williams's 1947 play A Streetcar Named Desire and to lavish effect in Capote's 1948 novel Other Voices, Other Rooms. Coded depictions of same-sex desire prior to 1945 retain much, if not all, of the closeted effect during the post-Renaissance era. However much Agrarian conservatives feared a collapse of their Bible-based ideology, Williams relegated his sexual insurgents to an offstage position, denying them dialogue and face-to-face contact with the audience. his 1989 novel A Visitation of Spirits, Randall Kenan departs from tradition by centering the narrative on Horace Cross, whose homosexuality compels his mad dance along multiple social margins. Yet at the height of the teenagers anguish, he shoots himself, like Blanche's young husband, Allan, who dies offstage in A Streetcar Named Desire. When Horace fires the shotgun that takes his life and blights his face, the portion of the anatomy that most identifies the self, Kenan continues the convention of killing off the gay character, a convention not exclusive to southern literature but nonetheless integral to much of its output at the midcentury point. Permeating all rifts--Renaissance and post-Renaissance, midcentury and contemporary--the book's braided themes of sexual repression, rebellion, and tragedy hold an almost implacable sway in the lives of the so-called perverse. Although Gary Richards, Suzanne Jones, and others duly recognize Kenan's revision of Faulkner's intergenerational conflicts, critics generally overlook the wider scope of Kenan's exchange with midcentury southern literature. an interview in 1995, Kenan openly acknowledges the importance of Southern Renaissance writers in shaping his literary imagination. Commenting on how the mountain of Faulkner's writing can be both crushing and inspiring, Kenan adds, In many ways I feel [my work] is a continuation (Rowell and Kenan 141). affirming the essentialness of reading, Kenan observes, No one said it more eloquently, I think, than Eudora Welty ... when she talks about how she started out reading and how, for her, writing came out of a desire to continue the conversation with the book. …