| It is not impossible to clarify a distinctive feature of the postbellum Southern literature by comparing it with the Japanese literature after the Second World War, as these two literatures share the fate as a literature produced in the aftermath of a war terminated by acceptance of "unconditional surrender." William Faulkner had in his mind a kinship between these two literatures when he said the following in front of the Japanese audience in 1955: |
| I believe it is war and disaster which remind man most that he needs a record of his endurance and toughness. I think that that is why after our own disaster there rose in my country, the South, a resurgence of good writing.... I believe something very like that will happen here in Japan within the next few years--that out of your disaster and despair will come a group of Japanese writers whom all the world will want to listen to, who will speak not a Japanese truth but a universal truth. 1 |
| However, what surprises us most is the fact
that he talked about the war ended barely ten years ago in the same manner
as he talked about the war almost a century old. Worth noting is the intensity
of his historical sensitivity with which to predict, before the Japanese
with the defeat in the last war still vivid in their mind, the emergence
"within the next few years" of a literature with a quality similar to the
literature of the Southern Renascence brought about more than half a century
after Appomattox. Indeed some young Japanese authors, including Shohei
Ooka and Hiroshi Noma, started writing soon after the war ended in 1945,
and achieved some accomplishments. The literary accomplishments of the
writers of the Japanese après-guerre school were undeniably endorsed
by their direct experiences of the war itself. But when Faulkner said what
we quoted above, he thought he could share the same pain out of "disaster
and despair" with those young writers through creating literature. He thought
his literature was the literature "after the war" as was a literature which
was to be created "within the next few years" by the Japanese young writers
fresh from their war experiences.
Here we are now fifty years after our defeat in the war. However, it is doubtful whether we feel we are still in the after-the-war period, or whether we now have a sense of defeat as intensely as Faulkner did about "his war," the Civil War, in 1955. Possibly, what is surprising may not be Faulkner's cohesive memory or sense of history but feebleness of our own historical sensitivity, frailty of our social/historical corporality, almost unable to accept the war as our shared ethnic experience or to support the sense that the war fifty years ago was our own war, as Kato Norihiro laments in his books. 2 By a curious coincidence, both of the wars ended with the losers' acceptance of unconditional surrender. It is said that when President Roosevelt considered how to end the war with Japan, he decided to follow the tactics originally employed by General U. S. Grant at the end of the Civil War. When Confederate General Robert E. Lee requested Grant to allow his soldiers to take their horses and mules home with them to work their farms, Grant replied that terms of surrender could never be otherwise than unconditional. But after Lee agreed to the terms, Grant accepted his request. A difference between our historical sensitivity and that of the Southerners might rise from the difference in quality between the historical developments which came before and after Roosevelt's "unconditional surrender" and those before and after Grant's, or it might result more possibly from our own peculiar historical situations surrounding the beginning of our modern era--the historical development from the end of the Tokugawa dynasty, through the forced termination of our national isolation, to the Meiji Imperial Restoration--which caused, for example, the absence of modern citizenship so that we could never have a chance to develop a full-fledged social self, as Maruyama Masao points out.3 We will no longer discuss this particular problem, but we would like to have it in mind that, as W. J. Cash points out, there was a recognition among the Southerners that they had no historical rupture between the pre-Civil War era and the era after the war, or that, according to C. Vann Woodward, even if there ever was a rupture, the Southerners accepted the rupture itself as their shared tragedy or historical "burden." This intense historical sensitivity of the Southerners has formulated what is more than a regional peculiarity; it is something very close to "ethnicity." Otherwise, it would not have been possible for Faulkner to have such a point of view as to look at the two defeats--one in a world war and the other in a civil war--with the same posture, as shown in our quotation above. It is indeed this intense sensitivity toward the regional, or "ethnic," fate that has distinguished Faulkner from other writers, and Southern writers from other American writers. America is a country established through severing itself from the past, and the severance from the Old World has been one of the most important factors that form the national identity of America; therefore, freedom from the past has always been favorably accepted, and "innocence" has been repeatedly acclaimed as an American virtue throughout the history of its literature. The literature of the South is un-American in the sense that it has been a literature created through fervent commitment to the peculiar regional past and with deep involvement in the "ethnic" tradition. William Faulkner has been regarded as a representational writer of the South and at the same time has ever been a literary influence far beyond the South. This is due not to the mere fact that he was a recorder of the Southern manners but to the fact that he succeeded in creating objective methods of expressing peculiarities of the Southern regionality, while he deeply involved himself in the Southern ways of life. The methods he created are to reconstruct History, strategies to express his recognition: "There is no such thing as was--only is." His method of expressing the Southern regionality has been followed not only by Southern writers after him, but also by writers all over the world fated to represent their own cultures which, like that of the South, have deviated from the official cultural norms, and therefore have been historically repressed and, in spite of (or because of) repression, have been unceasingly inherited. We intend to pick out three literary devices to express the sense of history adopted by William Faulkner, and discuss how those three devices are reflected or refracted in the four works by the Southern authors in the postmodern era. We said that the Japanese enfeebled historical sensitivity might have developed through the particular historical circumstances surrounding the peculiar modernization of this country. However, there is said to have been a universal situation in which the sense of history, the awareness of inheritance, once broke off when the world history shifted from the modern phase to the postmodern during the 1960s. During the decade, a modern nation ceased to be a symbol of its constituents' will, and lost its function of being a final topos where an individual could find his or her identity. The traditional solidarity of a society was weakened, which resulted from the absence of a unified sense of value among the members of the society. The Southern society was no exception; the historically formulated manners of the South, based on the strong sense of community among the people of the region, have been rapidly disappearing especially since the end of the civil rights movements and the war in Vietnam. The South has changed from "the Bible-belt" to "the Sun-belt." The South in the postmodern era, marked by huge shopping malls and hi-tech industrial systems, is no longer endowed with a densely woven network of traditional manners as it used to be in the past. Then how are writers of the South in the postmodern era conscious of being Southerners? Furthermore, how is their literature still "Southern"? We will try to answer these questions by analyzing how they react to the literary techniques of reviving "was" into "is" invented by their strong precursor, William Faulkner. We name, for our convenience, the three types of Faulkner's literary techniques representing the sense of history, respectively, "déjà-vu," "vision," and "obsessive-compulsive repetition." First of all, "déjà-vu" expresses an ungrounded conviction born in a Faulknerian character that he or she remembers seeing, doing, or smelling what he or she has never seen, done, or smelled before. The idea of "déjà-vu" is well illustrated in the beginning sentences of the sixth chapter of Light in August : "Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders." "Déjà-vu" discloses a situation in which one has "memory" with which one can remember what one does not consciously memorize, or one is already provided with what has been registered in the collective memories of one's community. This literary device produces an expression in which what one sees for the first time has in itself mysterious familiarity, evoking in one a strong sense of fate. Relied on inherited memories, it also gives expression to such a belief as is found in "The Bear," that "[Isaac McCaslin] had already inherited . . . without ever having seen it, the big old bear with one trap-ruined foot." "Vision" as a literary device is exemplified in the cases of Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom! and Darl Bundren in As I Lay Dying. Each of them becomes, in an inexplicable way, a visionary so that each reconstructs in a vision, in Quentin's case, the tragedy of the Sutpen household which happened in the distant past and therefore could not be directly experienced by him, or, in Darl's case, the scene of his mother's death while he is far away from her deathbed. This brings out an expression of a supernatural rapport that exists among those who share the commitment to the history of a community. Ike McCaslin comes to feel complicit in the crimes committed by his grandfather, when he envisions his fateful tie with his ancestral past as if it were exuding from between the lines of the old ledger entries. At the base of this technique lies the aura of a community which binds its members in one fate. "Obsessive-compulsive repetition" is a method adopted, for example, in the case of Young Bayard in which he repeats suicidal actions as if to compete with his dead brother, John. This technique creates a situation in which one feels as if one is destined to repeat what one's precursor did, irrespective of one's own will, solely because one is connected in a fate with that precursor. This method enables an expression of such a fatalistic resignation as Gail Hightower of Light in August commits himself to, that the living is always haunted by the dead. It is also effective in expressing a character's desire or obsession to confirm his or her connection with the past, as is found in the case of Emily Grierson of "A Rose for Emily," who poisons her Northern lover with arsenic and thereby repeats what her father did before his death and consummates what her father would have done if he were alive. These three literary devices are all based on a transcendental recognition that the troubled present connects with the past with an illuminating truth, and that this evanescently passing moment relates with History as reality. This recognition--where almost all the agonies the Faulkner characters have to suffer are originated--is concocted nowhere but in a community that has a strong affinity for "mystery" as lives in the community are almost religiously subservient to or obsessed by its deeply rooted "manners," as Flannery O'Connor suggests. There exits in Faulkner a recognition that the life of an individual is already determined by the fate due to which that individual was born in a particular place, and that it is controlled by something like geist loci or a territorial spirit, and further that the individual life is a product out of the social/historical relations that precede that particular life and are already hardened into conventions and crystallized as manners. And that recognition generate in Faulkner a moment which drives his truly individual act of writing a fiction into creating a community. On the other hand, the southern writers after the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam witnessed the scenes in which their community was failing of its proper functions. At the very root of the manners of the Southern community was a kind of "grammar" according to which white people and black people lived in the same community, if not harmoniously, but with minimum frictions. However, during the 60s, all those rules of the community, which had been spun out through repeated trials and errors among its constituents, were brought to light--a glaring abstract light of "racial equality"--and were all branded as bigoted or irrational. There were no rational ways to evade those new waves but to resort only to emotional and violent reactions. Furthermore, they had no truly imminent needs to counteract, as their ancestors had had when they met with the virulent denunciations by the Abolitionists before the Civil War. As for the war in Vietnam, it was an exceptional war in the sense that it did not produce as its by-product a war-time mentality--a mentality which usually contributes to and strengthens solidarity among the members of a community. The Vietnam war ended without presenting Americans with a cause to be upheld and supported; therefore, it did not necessarily create among them a common understanding that this was their war. Especially the younger generation, those who were about at the age for conscription, refused to give allegiance to the traditional manners of their community and aspired for creating their own manners, initiating the trend for "counterculture." This means the Southern writers who have started writing after the 1960s have to be aware of an unbridgeable gap in the sense of community between their generation and those before them. Their awareness of the gap is all the more intense because they know their region used to have manners, richness of which could be compared to none of the other regions. The Southern writers of the postmodern era have already known William Faulkner as their literary precursor. Those who want to write in/about the South can never be unaware of what Faulkner achieved as a Southern writer. Then it happens that they have come to know how deviated from the American norm their native region used to be through reading works by the past Southern authors including Faulkner. While their literary circumstance formulates a sort of semi-autonomous enclave in the entire social relations, their decision to become a writer has come out of their understanding of a mismatch between the actual social circumstance which they are to represent in their works and their literary circumstance which they have to refer to. Furthermore, their social circumstance itself is no longer special, unlike that surrounding the Southern authors up to the Faulkner's generation, which veered from the standardized or official American cultural norm, and was, therefore, parenthesized or excluded as anomaly. With decaying of the peculiar regional manners, the world the postmodern Southern writers live in does not look different from what they see on TV or on screen or in literary works from other regions. The present condition of their region no longer gives them an intense psychological drive to defend or criticize their native region, "the Southern rage to explain" in Fred Hobson's words, and thereby no longer creates for them a compelling literary incentive. Then how is it possible for the writers, confined in this ahistorical condition of the postmodern South, to pursuit through writing literature their ultimate mystery or what historical conditions have made them what they are? We will find four different approaches in the works by the Southern writers of the postmodern era. The first of the approaches allowed or possible for the postmodern Southern writers is to deliberately follow the Faulknerian methods only to expose the emptiness on the part of the manners of the era. Using the methods originally adopted for portraying a society like Faulkner's South and applying them to a society stripped of the traditional Southern manners, a postmodernist will produce a work in which expressed are fragmentation, superficiality and secularization of the manners of a society his or her work tries to represent. A work based on this approach turns out to be a parody, hollowly comical, with emptiness at its core. Barry Hannah's Ray (1980) is a novel that employs this approach. The protagonist of the novel, Doctor Ray, who served as an F-4 fighter-bomber pilot in Vietnam, is now hospitalized in Mobile for the treatment of alcoholism, recollecting on the bed his past life of sex and alcohol and violence, meaningless, reckless and lethargic. While reviving memories of Vietnam, including that of his fellow pilot from Mississippi shot down with a surface-to-air missile, are thoroughly fragmented, while his vision stays and threads through the Vietnam fragments. In the vision, Ray is fighting a fatal battle in Maryland with the Union army, as a Confederate captain, under the command of General Jeb Stuart. He says, "Oh, help me! I am losing myself in two centuries and two wars."4 However, Ray's vision of the Civil War does not necessarily mean he is fatefully connected with the past war, but the vision rather soberly illuminates his unappeasable situation in which he is alienated from anything like satisfying or meaningful memories, as is morbidly insinuated by his own words: "Me, I've been visiting Lee's Tomb a lot and taking in too much sound and bourbon" (51). After the vision ends with the annihilation of his cavalry, he says: "If warriors had known this story [of a visionary fight in the Civil War], we would have taken the war to the gooks with more dignity" (66). His fragmented and unfocused memories, juxtaposed by his extended vision of the Civil War, reflect the ephemerality of his actual life and his times. The second approach is to deal with the past as does Fred Chappell's I Am One of You Forever (1985). This semi-autobiographical novel reconstructs the past, but the past private and familial, the past on a small and limited scale, immediately related with the narrator. Brought about with this approach is not the density of Faulkner's multi-layered, luxuriating and flourishing past but the nostalgia of a simple and sentimental pastoral or fantasy. Urgency of the imminent past, an impending sense of "no such thing as was--only is," does not exist in this work, and the past is just like a framed picture, safely tamed and never haunting or threatening the present. Jess, the narrator, lives with his father and mother, his grandmother, and Johnson Gibbs, an eighteen-year-old boy raised in an orphanage and adopted by the family, in a piedmont farming village in North Carolina. The family lives a life that is happily self-contained. The novel consists of a series of charming, pathetic and beautiful episodes, recollected by Jess, of his maternal uncles and aunt, whose occasional visits make a pleasant stir in the monotonous life of his family. As he says, "I didn't want to hear about the old days, the drab tragedies and the cruel rusties. Those mountain people of used-to-be seemed to me as Siberians,"5 Jess seems to believe that he is completely free from anything like a sense of community, such a sense of the fated connection with its history as a Faulknerian character finds him/herself always already doomed to. However, in the last chapter of the novel, Jess is visited by a vision in which he, joined by his father and Johnson, who already died during the second world war, and one of his favorite uncles, goes on a hunting trip. Waking up in a hunting cabin disturbed by "the unplaceable familiarity of the vision"(183), Jess sees Johnson, or his ghost, approaching toward him saying, "'Well, Jess, are you one of us or not?'"(184) The answer to this question becomes the title of this novel, and with the final vision opens up in Jess a horizon of recognition that his life has been nurtured by what is beyond the closed familial relationship, and is never isolated from his lateral connections, and is by fate entwined with the lives of his uncles and aunts seemingly unique as aliens. If there is a community where still exist rich manners even in the postmodern South and there is a writer who has a "privilege" to live as a member of that community or have a deep commitment in it so that he or she can write about it, the writer is regarded in a sense as "fortunate." Such a community--one that is firmly bound in solidarity created through its members' understanding that they have shared the same fate--is a community Ernest J. Gaines describes in A Gathering of Old Men (1983). Gaines writes in the novel how the workers of a sugar-cane plantation in Louisiana, all old African Americans with the memories of their grandfathers who lived as slaves and their fathers as poor sharecroppers on the same plantation, still persist in living in the same old way, already deserted by their children and grandchildren who have gone to become city workers. This type of literature of the ethnic solidarity bred through the history of oppression and discrimination, supported by the network of the traditional manners knitting up each and every niche of life and always reminding the members of the community of its historical fate, should be discussed not in the context of Southern literature but in that of the African American literature. In spite of this, or as we should rather say, because of this, this novel by Gaines freely exploits the Faulkner's methods with success. A member of the old Cajun family who has been in charge of this plantation was killed in "the quarters." Having long nursed a grudge against the family, but at the same time remembering bitterly that they have been always intimidated into inaction for fear of the family's violent retorts, the eighteen old men of the quarters decide that this will be the last chance allowed them to pay off, and gather at the house where the murder took place. Every old man takes with him a twelve-gauge shotgun with empty number-five shells, for everyone wants to defend, at the risk of his own life, the one who did the killing with the same type of weapon. They want to save his life because he is a member of their community who has endured the same humiliation with them. They believe that to save his life means to save their own lives. The structure of the novel is precisely that of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying; fifteen narrators, different in age and sex and race, narrate, each from his or her distinct point of view, how the news of the murder spreads through the quarters at the beginning and how the murderer and the boss of a group who come to lynch him are killed in the gunfight at the denouement. One of the old men talks to the sheriff, who is paralyzed at the situation in which every old man gathering stubbornly insists he is the one who did the killing, as follows: |
| "That's something you can't see, Sheriff, 'cause you never could see it," he said. "You can't see Red Rider with Job, Jack with Diamond. You can't see the church with the people, and you can't hear the singing and the praying. You had to be here then to be able to don't see it and don't hear it now. But I was here then, and I don't see it now, and that's why I did it [shot and killed the white man]. I did it for them back there under the trees. I did it 'cause that tractor is getting closer and closer to that graveyard, and I was scared if I didn't do it, one day that tractor was go'n come in there and plow up them graves, getting rid of all proof that we ever was. Like now they trying to get rid of all proof that black people ever farmed this land with plows and mules--like if they had nothing from the starten but motor machines. Sure, one day they will get rid of the proof that we ever was, but they ain't go'n do it while I'm still here. Mama and Papa worked too hard in these fields. They mama and they papa people worked too hard, too hard to have that tractor just come in that graveyard and destroy all proof that they ever was. I'm the last one left. I had to see that the graves stayed for a little while longer. But I just didn't do it for my own people. And I did it for every four-o'clock, every rosebush, every palm-of-Christian ever growed on this place." 6 |
| The old man testifies that at the back of this crime there has been
a long disgraced history of his community, and therefore the community
itself committed this crime in order to vindicate itself, and that for
the very reason it was committed by his community, it is his own crime.
The tortures his community has endured are now before his eyes crystallized
in a vision which the sheriff, as a white man, cannot see. Shown in the
quotation above is the unmistakable Faulknerian literary style and effect,
with a distinctive African American twist. As Fred Hobson rightly comments,
in the postmodern South, there are none other than the black Southerner
who could be seen as "the quintessential southern writer," and this would
be "a final irony of southern history."7
Lastly, we will discuss the type of a writer who is considered more purely postmodern, accepting and utilizing the desouthernized and therefore shallow manners of the time and nonetheless pursuing a new possibility for literary creativity. Then whether a writer under this category is still regarded as a Southern writer and maintains a genealogical kinship to Faulkner, we would like to discuss by taking up as an example Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country (1985). The protagonist of the novel is Sam (Samantha) Hughes, an eighteen-year-old high-school graduate in Kentucky, whose life is completely devoid of anything traditionally Southern and is surrounded with everything that characterizes a life of a normal eighteen-year-old girl of the American 80s--sex and drugs, Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson, M*A*S*H and "Atari." This novel can be called a comedie de mœrs of the American 80s, and its overall style is not that of Faulkner but rather that of Raymond Carver. Sam's father was killed in Vietnam before she was born, and her mother, remarried, lives with her new husband and baby. Sam lives alone with her uncle, her mother's brother, Emmett Smith, a Vietnam-war veteran who has led a lethargic life since he came home. One day she decides that Emmett's lethargy does come from his contamination by "Agent Orange," a chemical weapon used in Vietnam, and since that day she has been suffering from a free-floating anxiety, a feeling of being disconnected or suspended in air, in her disoriented life and has been looking for a way to connect her life with something substantial, grounded or real. Then she becomes impatient to know everything about the death of her father. She besieges her mother, Emmett and the other veterans in town with questions of what it was like back in 60s or in Vietnam, or how her father fought and died there. However, they refuse to tell or even recollect anything about the war and its time. In spite of-- or because of--their refusals, she finds herself feeling a strange magnetic power of the war and being attracted to the 60s. She "long[s] for the sixties," and is "feeling the delayed stress of the Vietnam War," for it is "her inheritance."8 At last she gets her hands on the diary her father kept in Vietnam, in which he wrote all too innocently and excitedly that he found "a dead gook rotting under some leaves" had "a special stink" and killing a "V. C." was easier than he had thought (203-4). Sam, while feeling sick with the too naked expressions in her father's diary, nonetheless feels overwhelmed with the vivid reality of being alive radiated from his descriptions. The novel ends with a scene in which she goes to Washington, D. C. to see her father's name engraved on the Vietnam Memorial and finds her own name, "Sam Hughes," on it, too (244). The reader of this novel of the mannerless manners of the American 80s is surprised to find that this is after all a novel like Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom!--a novel about the centripetal force exerted by what is absent now, or what is past and recollected in the present. Sam cannot find a tie with the past in her life, an evidence that she is somehow connected with the past. Although a few trivial facts about her life are reflected or repeated in the episodes of a TV program or in the lyrics of a popular song, she knows that is merely accidental, just a vain coincidence, and not at all anything like an expression of her connection with what is beyond her. This is, as we may say, a novel about Sam's agonizing recognition of her inability to find a tie with the past or to feel what is past but is still alive in the present through "déjà-vu" or "vision," such dramatic means as Faulkner's characters were capable of before her. However, as Faulkner's characters found the origin of what had made them what they were in the Civil War, or in their fathers' or grandfathers' involvement with it, so Sam tries to find her own in the war in Vietnam or in her father's involvement with it. The way Sam finds in her father's diary his unpardonable sins and at the same time what originated her life reminds us of the way Ike McCaslin of "The Bear" found what had destined his life in the old ledger entries by his father and uncle. The title of the novel, "in country," means "in Vietnam," as the phrase is used in the novel as follows: "'When you're in country, there's so little connection to the World'"(111), or "What was the dirt like in Vietnam? In country, they said. Was it clay like Emmett's trench, or red like the dirt in Georgia she had seen pictures of?"(120) Vietnam in her imagination is a place isolated from the civilized world, benighted and left behind in time, where scandalously immoral acts took place, but at the same time a place where existed the unviolated nature and the overwhelming reality ebullient with vigorous lives. Vietnam in Sam's mind seems to have some curious kinship with the old Yoknapatawpha in the minds of Faulkner's characters. What we know from the observations above is that the Southern writers in the postmodern era, though deprived of a socialized/historicized moment in which to sense a connection with the past, nonetheless try to bridge the unbridgeable historical hiatus through creating literature with variously modified usage of Faulkner's dramatic expressions of the South. To reconfirm our point, we would like to emphasize again here that the agonies which Faulkner's major characters, including Quentin, Ike, and Joe Christmas, have to go through stem from their perception that they are severed from the illuminating past. This means that Faulkner wrote his novels, as do postmodern Southern writers, with a tragic sense of historical discontinuity in his mind. Primarily, a literary work, before or after Faulkner, is always what represents its author's impatience to connect him/herself with Truth or Reality, and that to work on a literary work is a desperate attempt to seek for such a fulfilling connection. But the point is that Faulkner had or was able to have a transcendental recognition that the present did connect with the past, and that only a human being was not capable of knowing the connection. The postmodern writers cannot have such a conviction as Faulkner's, and that makes a crucial difference between them and their precursor. Heroic or epic agonies of the Faulkner's major characters are realized by the novelist's firm conviction of the connection between the past and the present, and consequently are free from such fragility or flippancy as Sam's agonies are doomed to, and never fall into a state of "signifying nothing" as do Ray's. For those postmodern or post-Southern writers who live in the totally desouthernized social situations and therefore cannot write à la Faulkner any longer. But William Faulkner is still a strong literary precursor, and his literary achievements are what they are fated never to ignore once they have found themselves Southerners and as long as they commit themselves in writing literature. In other words, what is William Faulkner as the fateful literary influence to the postmodern writers is what is Caddy to Quentin Compson, what is absent or cannot be present but is still blatantly present, or what never was and always constantly is. |
| 1. William Faulkner, "To the
Youth of Japan," in Robert A. Jellife, ed., Faulkner at Nagano (Tokyo:
Kenkyusha, 1956) 187.
2. Refer to the following books by KATO Norihiro, Amerika no kage, "The Shadow of America" (Tokyo: Kawade-shobo, 1985), Nihon to iu shintai, "Historical/Social Corporality of Japan" (Tokyo: Kodan-sha, 1994), and Haisen go ron, "Discussions: Japan after the Second World War" (Tokyo: Chikuma-shobo, 1997). 3. See MARUYAMA Masao, Nihon no shiso, "Discussions of the Modern Japanese Thoughts" (1961; Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 1997). 4. Barry Hannah, Ray (1980; rpt. New York: Grove, 1994) 41. The subsequent quotations are from this edition and the page numbers are cited in parentheses. 5. Fred Chappell, I Am One of You Forever (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1985) 61. The subsequent quotations are from this edition and the page numbers are cited in parentheses. 6. Ernest J. Gaines, A Gathering of Old Men (1983; rpt. New York: Vintage, 1992) 92. 7. Fred Hobson, The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1991) 101. 8. Bobbie Ann Mason, In Country (1985; New York: Harper Perennial, 1993) 89, 123. The subsequent quotations are from this edition and the page numbers are cited in parentheses. |
| Cash, W. J. The Mind of the South. 1941;
rpt. Garden City: Doubleday, 1954.
Escott, Paul D. and David R. Goldfield, eds. Major Problems in the History of the American South Volume II: The New South. Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1990. Grantham, Dewey W. The South in Modern America: A Region at Odds. New York: Harper Collins, 1994. Gray, Richard. Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region. 1986; New York: Cambridge UP, 1989. Griffin, Larry J. and Don H. Doyle, eds. The South as an American Problem. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1995. Hobson, Fred. Tell about the South: The Southern Rage to Explain. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1993. Jehlen, Myra. Class and Character in Faulkner's South. 1976; rpt. Secaucus: Citadel, 1978. O'Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners. Ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. 1961; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984. Woodward, C. Vann. The Burden of Southern History. 1960; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1993. Copywright (C) 1999 Goto Kazuhiko |