The South Rises: Revenance, Region, and the Idea of Place in US Literary History

Abstract

The South Rises: Revenance, Region, and the Idea of Place in US Literary History Peter Lurie (bio) There will always be someone to rise up to the south. —Gilles Deleuze (“Many Politics” 131) When Quentin Compton matriculated at Harvard in 1909, Faulkner and many others in Mississippi would have known that at that point, as well as in 1929, this was not the Ivy League school most likely to accept Southerners.1 As its most infamous President and alumnus illustrates, Princeton University was known in 1910s and beyond as the “Southern Ivy.” By the 1880s, Southerners in fact made up a majority of Princeton’s all-male student body. Before Woodrow Wilson, John C. Breckinridge, who attended Princeton before the Civil War, became a presidential candidate for the Southern Democratic Party in 1860 and, later, a general in the Confederate Army. Faulkner’s choice, then, to send a son of the South to Harvard is interesting. In light of his father’s declaration that “no compson has ever disappointed a lady” (SF 118), it may even appear anomalous. Quentin feels displaced at Harvard, a fact that informs his activities and attitudes in both The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! His responses to his cultural environment are due to the seeming strangeness and hostility he feels in New England, as opposed to what he might have found in the genteel eating clubs of Princeton, New Jersey. (“Tell about the South,” he’s admonished in Absalom [145]; in The Sound and the Fury he reflects, “a Southerner had to be always conscious of niggers. I thought that Northerners would expect him to” [57]). “Placing,” or rather displacing Quentin precariously in New England and in Cambridge, though, makes a particular kind of literary-historical sense. Doing so amounts to Faulkner returning to a site that figures in nearly any standard version of American literary history as its point of origin. It is the very prominence of New England and Boston, then, that later revisions of American literary history or of canon-formation worked against, including those of the New Critics who seized on Faulkner, most particularly when they sought to elevate Southern letters in the 1940s and ‘50s.2 The modernity of the Southern Renaissance, as has been pointed out, ironically contributed to the movement’s definition against such models as well as against the region’s and the nation’s [End Page 63] modernizing.3 The very notion of a Southern “renaissance” that the New Critics enabled implies a link to Quentin, at least as concerns his status in Absalom and his rebirth in New England after his watery perishing in the Charles River in The Sound and the Fury. Reversing the North-South Axis It is this displacing of New England by the South that certain versions of literary history perform, as does Faulkner’s own use of Boston or Cambridge. At the heart of this reversal of the “directionality” of literary history is what I might call a latent New England-ism in Faulkner’s writing, particularly that which attends details about Quentin and his experience in Cambridge. Faulkner’s and his antecedents’ Gothicism is often noted as a link between his “regional” modernism and nineteenth-century, Northeast writers, and I turn to that and other generic affinities below. Most specifically I will trace the sharing of a perceived darkness or perversity to the then-new Republic—the hauntings and threats that animate the works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Brockden Brown—with Faulkner’s rendering of his native region, with Quentin’s own ghostly return, or “revenance,” itself an echo of these earlier figurations. Worth mentioning briefly first though are perspectives or tropes that appear in canonical New England works that recur in Faulkner’s fiction. Thoreau’s essay “Walking,” for example, stresses the value of a perambulatory wandering that characterizes Quentin’s journey through Cambridge on June 2, 1910.4 Perhaps more importantly, the essay includes a number of references to freedom, land ownership, and the provenance of literature and the modern, New World, ideas that inform key Faulkner works too. Thoreau inveighs against private property throughout the essay. At certain points...