Southern literature

FLANNERY O’CONNOR (1925-1964) was a Southern writer relying on regional settings, portraying grotesque characters as she remarked that “anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader.” Her trademark is foreshadowing, giving a reader an idea of what will happen far before it happens. She wrote with the notion that the world is charged with God but she is not apologetic like other prevalent Catholic literature of the time. She portrays backward Southern characters that undergo transformation of character that brings them closer to the Catholic mind. Her characters are often freaks that do not fit into society but they are not totally negative.

Her most famous novel is Wise Blood (1952) and she published two well-known collections of short stories A Good Man is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965).

In the short story of the same name, Everything That Rises Must Converge, there is an older white woman who is proud to be of rich background even though her family is no longer rich since their lost their plantations. She still proudly recalls her ancestors, slavers, and thinks of blacks as inferior. When the doctor advices her to lose some weight and she has to attend courses, she refuses to go by bus alone as she does not want to ride unsegregated bus. The son finished college but did not find work and mother still feeds him.  According to the mother, the modern world is a mess. The son does not feel dominated by his mother and wants to teach her a lesson about modern world.

Upon getting into a bus, the son waits for some black person to come and sits right next to him. He enjoys watching his mother to go angry about it but when he tries to stir a conversation with him, the black man takes it as annoyance. Then a black woman and a child get into the bus. The mother does not mind black children because for her all children are cute but the black woman does not like the idea of her child sitting next to a white woman – racism from the other side. In addition, the black woman wears the same expensive hat at the mother! When getting off the bus, the mother wants to give a black child a penny but the black woman refuses it angrily. The son is happy that the mother learned her lesson but because her blood pressure rose thanks to the incident, she collapses and dies. The son enters the world of guild and sorrow.

EUDORA WELTY (1909-2001) /judora/ was writing after the war but her work is still modernist which makes her a representative of modernism in Southern fiction. She is often using a stream of consciousness, she was influenced by Greek mythology and as T. S. Eliot she was blending old legends to contemporary narratives. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Optimist's Daughter (1972).

WALKER PERCY (1916-1990) was influenced existentialism of Sartre and Camus and introduced into Southern fiction two terms: Rotation = new unexpected experience that break stereotype of life; repetition = repeated event of everyday's life that results in alienation. His characters, as in his novel The Moviegoer (1961), are often mentally handicapped or disabled who, however, paradoxically view the world more clearly.

ELIZABETH SPENCER (*1921) wrote psychological realism influenced by Henry James. She concentrated on difference between Italian and American mentality and her works are feminist orientated, picturing woman experience of growing up and becoming independent on men. Novel The Light in the Piazza (1960).

RICHARD FORD (*1944) a contemporary writer who was influenced by Hemingway and he is known for two novels: The Sportswriter (1986) follows a life of an unsuccessful novelist who became writing a sports column for the local newspaper and experiences personal crisis like the death of his son; and its sequel Independence Day (1995) for which he got a Pulitzer Prize.

CORMAC McCARTHY (*1933) is a contemporary representative of American western but not traditional one we are used to from the exploring the frontier. Instead, he is using postmodernist technique of blending times and genres and he is mixing western with southern gothic and post apocalyptic writing.

In his novel The Orchard Keeper (1965) he transforms the rural south into the realm of myth, yet his rustic characters evoke little of the heroism of Irish heroes, though preserve their tragedy. The novel tells a story of a woodsman who lives at peace with the nature in a small cabin near orchard. For years he has been tending the corpse of an unknown stranger who mysteriously turned up. The woodsman also tried to teach his knowledge about the forest to a young boy whose father, a petty criminal, has been murdered. Unaware that his uncle has been guarding the corpse, the boy thinks his father was a hero. Ironically, the boy then considers a hero a man who killed his father.

Child of God (1973) is his most extreme novel, a meditation on the lost soul, featuring a murdered and necrophile who was expelled from the human society and ended up living in underground caves which he decorates with trophies of killed animals and human victims.

His recent work includes western The Boarder Trilogy whose all instalments were all filmed, especially All the Pretty Horses (1992) with actor stars.

ERNEST GAINES /gejns/ (*1933) is a contemporary African-American Southern author, born in Louisiana which had an influence for his fiction. Although born generations after slavery, Gaines grew up impoverished in old slave quarters on the plantation. A visiting teacher would teach him for five months of year, depending on when the children were not picking cotton in the fields. His first novel was written at age 17 while bybysitting his brother. Similarly to Faulkner, he created his own fictional Southern town where all stories take place. He draws motifs from childhood memories, writes in Afro-American dialect and portrays culture of southern blacks as him his novels Gathering of Old Men (1983) and A Lesson Before Dying (1993).