A Critical Study of the Work of Chris Offutt Katherine E. Edwards Phd, English Literature the Universit
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Forward Through History: A Critical Study of the Work of Chris Offutt Katherine E. Edwards PhD, English Literature The University of Edinburgh 2008 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 1 List of Abbreviations 2 Epigraph 3 Introduction Forward Through History: Escaping the Tyranny of the Past in the Work of Chris Offutt 4 Chapter 1 Appalachian Literature and the Peculiar Burden of Stereotyping 20 Chapter 2 This is the Country Nobody Visits: The Politics of Representation in Kentucky Straight 39 Chapter 3 Privileged Access: Constructed Memories and the Southern Autobiographical Impulse 70 Chapter 4 Half of What I Know: The Autobiographical Impulse in The Same River Twice 90 Chapter 5 Fur Coats, or Foucault? Southern Writers in the American West 114 Chapter 6 Souls on the Run: The Good Brother Goes West 138 Chapter 7 I Don’t Hate it: Place and Placelessness in Southern Literature 167 Chapter 8 We Just Wanted to Be Free: Out of the Woods and the Duelling Perils of Displacement and Immobility 181 Chapter 9 Second Hand Smoke: Cultural Appropriation and Holocaust Literature 204 Chapter 10 Breaking the Oath of Silence: Entitlement and Responsibility in No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home 222 Conclusion Shifting Horizons of Expectation: The Future of Southern Writing 250 Appendix I Names and Naming in The Good Brother: Erasing History 257 Appendix II Men and Cars in Offutt’s Work 261 Bibliography 265 1 Acknowledgements The completion of this project owes a debt of thanks to many people, but primarily to my mother, who has always encouraged us to work hard -- no matter what -- and to my father, whose idea it was in the first place. His wisdom still seems infinite after all these years, and especially after a recent epic phone call. My sister, Emily, has shared membership in this particular group of peculiar people (those who have attempted a PhD), and provided solid advice and welcome distraction. My brother, Colin, must be thanked particularly for a conversation on a car trip from Antigonish to Halifax, where he forced me to realise that perhaps this thesis might be “relevant,” after all. Of course, my gratitude also goes to my supervisor, Ken Millard, whose office has been the site of many discussions about the nuances of southern literature. The first of such conversations, in January of 2003, convinced me that Edinburgh, in general, and Ken, in particular, would guide me well along this tempestuous voyage. I hope that his office is improved by the addition of Katie’s Korner … Many thanks, also, to my flatmates, past and present: Laura, Andrew, Gill, and Ollie (and to John). They have consistently provided the relief, counsel, support, and -- best of all -- fun that I have needed over the past four years. Finally, I would like to thank Chris Offutt, who probably won’t like it anyway. 2 List of Abbreviations GB The Good Brother KS Kentucky Straight NH No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home OW Out of the Woods SR The Same River Twice: A Memoir 3 He wanted to change his pattern for awhile, get away from books, away from Kentucky, have an adventure off someplace he’d never been before. To set forth in his car and head west with no precise plan or destination was unlike anything Wilgus had ever done before, and the prospect of the journey had filled his mind ever since school was out. Gurney Norman: Kinfolks: The Wilgus Stories 4 Introduction Forward Through History: Escaping the Tyranny of the Past In the Work of Chris Offutt In response to Temple Drake’s dramatic announcement of the demise of her past in William Faulkner’s 1951 novel, Requiem for a Nun, Gavin Stevens tells her that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past” (85). These words have often been misappropriated as support for critical theorists searching for traditionalism in southern literature, those who insist that the gaze of the southern author is always cast upon an idealised historical moment. In his aptly-named 1998 text, Inventing Southern Literature, Michael Kreyling takes a further cue from Faulkner (although this time from Intruder in the Dust); he notes that “it is always a few minutes before two o’clock on July 3, 1863, and Pickett is always about to give the fateful order to charge: southern identity is always about to be achieved and obliterated in the same fateful instant” (168). The connection between southern literature and history is undeniably important, but the focus on history in this region’s literature is both ubiquitous and potentially limiting. Faulkner’s phrases have been manipulated to paralyse successions of writers; though they exist in the present, their membership in the southern tradition necessitates continual negotiation of their past. A more faithful interpretation of Gavin Stevens’ statement recognises that it is not the rearward glance of those in the present that keeps the past alive; it is the past’s intrusion into the present. The first interpretation assumes an active devotion to a collective history, while the second emphasises the inescapability of the past within a culture whose identity has been defined by dramatic historical moments. The history of the South informs its literature, and the stewards of that literature, particularly contemporary 5 writers, need not seek out a past when its influences are as pervasive as they are formative. Ideas of historical consciousness in the study of southern literature, however, are in fact relatively recent in what is itself a young field of critical thought. The appropriately-titled New Criticism1 movement (spanning approximately the 1940s to the 1970s in the South) “made history in effect a fallacy” -- that is, divorced the aesthetic significance of the text from the historical context from which it emanated (Kreyling, 34). Louis D. Rubin is credited with reintroducing history to literary criticism; as recently as 1984, he claimed that “literature may usefully be viewed in terms of its historical unfolding, its changing relationships to changing time and place … [this notion] is not universally acknowledged in contemporary critical thought” (quoted in Kreyling, 33). Indeed, since Rubin’s comments in the early 1980s, contemporary southern literary theory has succeeded in its attempts to “subvert the tendency to think of aesthetic representation as ultimately autonomous, separable from its cultural context and hence divorced from the social, ideological, and material matrix in which all art is produced and consumed” (Greenblatt, 164). A contemplation of southern literature without a focus on its historical connotations is no doubt puzzling to the external reader: the South in the American imagination exists chiefly as an historical entity -- Faulkner once noted that “the South is a little behind the rest of the country” (quoted in Gray, 1986: 168). What may have been current for Robert Penn Warren, let us imagine, always appeared to the external reader to have been set in the past; that is, what is contemporary to the South has always functioned as a facet of American history. Lucille Odom, the precocious narrator of Josephine Humphreys’ Rich in Love (1987), declares that she “felt strongly that history was a category comprising not only famous men of bygone eras, 1 Twentieth-century New Critics of English and American literature advocated close reading of texts and the exclusion of material external to the primary source. In the South, the Agrarians (for instance, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, and Cleanth Brooks) were devotees of this movement, emphasising particularity over generality. 6 but me, yesterday” (47). This is perhaps the most persistent aspect of the mythology of the South -- that it exists as a sort of living history, a testament to the past in the present. As much as contemporary southern literary theory is primarily concerned with contextualising its works within an historical paradigm, it must also combat the eschatological predictions of critics from the early 1970s. Sociologists during that period of intensive social and political upheaval in the South claimed that there was “every good reason to believe that to the extent that the daily occupational and educational environment of the Southerner becomes similar to that of the non- Southerner, the attitudes and values of the two will also become indistinguishable” (McKinney and Bourque, 399). Many southerners of the time could not foresee a halt to the onslaught of change that the South was experiencing, nor imagine that so much change could take place without the southern identity being drastically altered. Vann Woodward famously remarked that “in the race between the bulldozer and the magnolia tree, the bulldozer is clearly winning” (quoted in Core, xi). Southern identity, scholars feared, was dependent upon economic, structural, and societal systems for its definition -- and southern literature was consumed by the region’s identity. Southern identity, however, as obtuse and ambiguous a concept that it may be, is at once greater and less than the sum of its structural parts. Greater in the sense that its resilience, as of the first decade of the twenty-first century, is self-evident, and less in that it is rooted in conjecture and impression. “The South is not the North; Atlanta is not New York; but neither Atlanta nor the South is at all what it used to be,” writes Walter Sullivan (94). The South of the closing decades of the last century is indeed “not at all what it used to be,” but it remains distinctively the South all the same -- that is, “not New York.” How can this be possible? How can the identity of a region eclipse the eradication of the very ideals upon which it rested? Simply, it has become apparent 7 that what the Agrarians2 and the New Critics -- and indeed, Americans in general -- thought were the foundations of southern identity were not necessarily so.