Mrs Shortley’s New Planet: Alternate geographies and Deep Time in southern modernism

Abstract

The literature of the American South has often been seen as an example of literary regionalism and of writing turned inward upon its own history. This article, however, argues that this literature in the period between 1919 and 1945 was decisively shaped by its thematic and formal interactions with post-Versailles Europe. The event of the First World War was a critical point in this re-orientation of southern literature toward the extra-regional and toward modernist experimentalism. It was a lifelong literary task of William Faulkner, beginning with his earliest fiction in the 1920s and culminating in A fable, to try to understand this war as a collective southern experience (which in A fable is achieved through the symbolism of the Black Atlantic and that of the Unknown Soldier). The article employs Wai Chee Dimock’s theoretical categories of planetary extension and deep time to show that the South of the southern modernists was a transatlantic South, one permeated by alternate geographies and long durations. Works such as Faulkner’s A fable, Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, man of the mountain and James Agee’s Let us now praise famous men not only extend beyond the territorial borders of the regional South but reach into the long duration of theological time and of evolutionary biology. In this regard, the article particularly stresses the unexpected influence of Weimar political theology on Faulkner and Hurston’s work. Through their bold use of planetary geography and long durations Faulkner, Hurston and Agee emerge as radical critics of their region and its agrarian ideology, offering an imaginative counter-statement to such fixed southern entities as segregation, endemic agricultural poverty, and internal colonization.