ORALITY AND SOUTHERN LITERATURE by CLAY ALLEN MORTON (Under the Direction of Hubert McAlexander) ABSTRACT For most if not all of its history, the South has been marked by a high degree of oral residue that has distinguished it from the rest of the United States. This study explores the influence of residual orality on Southern literature. The first chapter provides the historical background necessary to gauge the South’s resistance to the transformative powers of typographic literacy. Education, reading habits, publishing, and the literary life are discussed. Chapter Two synthesizes research on oral language with stylistic analyses of Southern literary works, specifically James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones (1927) and Eudora Welty’s The Ponder Heart (1954), in order to illustrate the oral bent of Southern writing. Next, two well-known short stories, William Gilmore Simms’s “Sharp Snaffles” (1870) and William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” (1930) are shown to be characterized by the strategies of folk narrative. While “Sharp Snaffles” corresponds to a well-documented and ancient oral narrative pattern, “A Rose for Emily” is an essentially typographic work that is organized according to an oral storytelling structure. Finally, the characteristically oral modes of thought and expression cataloged by Walter J. Ong are compared to certain well-known theories of Southern exceptionalism, especially those outlined in the Southern Agrarian manifesto I’ll Take My Stand (1930) and Zora Neale Hurston’s “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934). These oral Southern epistemologies are shown to be significant to Hurston’s classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and to the poetry of Donald Davidson. These discussions provide not only a new theory of Southern exceptionalism, but also a new theoretical framework for reading Southern texts. INDEX WORDS: American literature, Southern literature, orality, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, James Weldon Johnson, William Gilmore Simms, Donald Davidson, Zora Neale Hurston ORALITY AND SOUTHERN LITERATURE by CLAY ALLEN MORTON B.A., University of South Carolina Aiken, 1997 M.A., University of Georgia, 2000 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2005 © 2005 Clay Allen Morton All Rights Reserved ORALITY AND SOUTHERN LITERATURE by CLAY ALLEN MORTON Major Professor: Hubert McAlexander Committee: Richard Menke Hugh Ruppersburg Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2005 DEDICATION For Gail and Jake iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Grateful acknowledgment is made to my committee members. Hubert McAlexander and Richard Menke worked with me on this project from its inception, and their insight and encouragement have been invaluable. Hugh Ruppersburg was extremely gracious in stepping in at the last minute to round out the committee. Other faculty members whose generous assistance helped shape sections of this dissertation include Valerie Babb, James Kibler, Michael Moran, and Carl Rapp. I am also grateful to the University of Georgia Graduate School, which supported my work on this project in the form of a Dissertation Completion Assistantship for academic year 2004-05. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .........................................................................v LIST OF FIGURES ...............................................................................viii INTRODUCTION .................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1 THE ORAL CHARACTER OF SOUTHERN CULTURE............... 22 Literacy and Education ...................................................... 26 Writing and Publishing....................................................... 44 2 TOWARD A POETICS OF SOUTHERN ORALITY ..................... 73 James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones ........................ 76 Eudora Welty’s The Ponder Heart........................................ 95 3 ORALITY AND SOUTHERN NARRATIVE: PATTERN AND STRUCTURE .................................................................... 108 Pattern: Simms’s “Sharp Snaffles” .................................... 112 Structure: Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” .......................... 128 4 SOUTHERN EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF ORALITY..................................................................... 153 What Once Was Sung: Donald Davidson .......................... 162 Making the Dream the Truth: Zora Neale Hurston ............ 186 vi CODA ................................................................................................ 204 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................. 214 vii LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1: The Honey-Trickster Pattern ............................................... 120 Figure 2: The Narrative Structure of “A Rose for Emily”...................... 139 viii INTRODUCTION The oral tradition of the South is a world in which past and present concert in a babble of chat and memories and observation and complicated kinship relations. An oral world keeps multiple blood relationships in easy acoustic focus in the same way as a pre-literate people have no trouble in managing complex word formations and inflections. The author of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn stays in the heart of this oral world . —Marshall McLuhan (Essential 198) Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1945) revolves around the Wingfields, a white Mississippi-Delta family transplanted to St. Louis where they grapple with the disappointments and hardships of the Great Depression. Although the connection has garnered little attention, it is not difficult to read the play against the backdrop of the revolution in communications technology that took place between the transcontinental telegraph of the 1860s and the television explosion of the 1950s. The family’s patriarch, “a telephone man who fell in love with long distances” (5-6), abandons his wife and children for a life of independence and adventure, sending them nothing but a picture postcard from Mazatlan. The only two words written on it, “Hello—Good-bye!” (6) are “telephone words” which became common in American English only with the advent of the medium: previously, the former had been an expression of surprise rather than a greeting, and the latter had been too high-toned for casual conversation (Barron 26). This fact, in addition to Wingfield’s profession and love of “long distance,” suggests that the three central characters of 1 the play have been abandoned not only by a roguish husband and father but by the modern technologies of information with which he is associated. In the absence of the stability of the traditional two-parent home, the remaining Wingfields struggle to make ends meet and find personal fulfillment. Amanda, the jilted wife, earns money by means of the technology that provided her faithless husband’s vocation: a kind of prototype telemarketer, she sells subscriptions to a women’s magazine over the phone by salaciously describing serialized romances. A more degrading occupation would be difficult to imagine. The physically disabled daughter Laura briefly attends business college to learn the typewriter, but this textual device is so foreign to her mind and body that the experience makes her violently ill. And the son Tom works at a shoe manufacturer’s warehouse where he is similarly sickened by the “celotex interior” and “fluorescent—tubes” (27). Yet it is to electric media that both junior Wingfields constantly retreat for escape from the painful reality of their lives: Laura to the soothing melodies of her Victrola gramophone, and Tom to the adventure of the cinema. Both of these sanctuaries, however, prove illusory and hollow. Amanda’s own haven from an intolerable existence is not technological but rather comes in the form of the oldest medium of all, oral storytelling. Throughout the play, the dehumanizing techno-culture of 1930s St. Louis is contrasted with the idyllic South of her girlhood 2 memories. While the industrial city is a place of isolating technologies such as film and recorded sound, media that reproduce performances for audiences to receive passively and not participate in, the Blue Mountain of her stories is communal and affirming. When Tom asks his mother how she entertained the scores of gentlemen callers she would receive on Sunday afternoons, Amanda’s reply depicts the South in terms of the social folkways of oral culture: I understood the art of conversation! . Girls in those days knew how to talk, I can tell you. They knew how to entertain their gentlemen callers. It wasn’t enough for a girl to be possessed of a pretty face and a graceful figure— although I wasn’t slighted in either respect. She also needed to have a nimble wit and a tongue to meet all occasions. (9) Because her suitors were all “planters and sons of planters” (10), Amanda assumed that she would marry such a person and live out her life in this halcyon agrarian setting. “But,” she tells Laura’s own gentleman caller, Jim O’Connor, later in the play, “man proposes—and woman accepts the proposal!—To vary that old, old saying a little bit—I married no planter! I married a man who worked for the telephone company! . A telephone man who—fell in love with long-distance!— Now he travels and I don’t know where!—” (80). In the South there was a system of orality in place which, in addition to supplying formulaic