Reading for the Body

The Recalcitrant Materiality of Southern Fiction, 1893-1985

Jay Watson, Jon Smith, Riché Richardson

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780820343761
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Jay Watson argues that southern literary studies has been overidealized and dominated by intellectual history for too long. In Reading for the Body, he calls for the field to be rematerialized and grounded in an awareness of the human body as the site where ideas, including ideas about the U.S. South itself, ultimately happen.

Employing theoretical approaches to the body developed by thinkers such as Karl Marx, Colette Guillaumin, Elaine Scarry, and Friedrich Kittler, Watson also draws on histories of bodily representation to mine a century of southern fiction for its insights into problems that have preoccupied the region and nation alike: slavery, Jim Crow, and white supremacy; the marginalization of women; the impact of modernization; the issue of cultural authority and leadership; and the legacy of the Vietnam War. He focuses on the specific bodily attributes of hand, voice, and blood and the deeply embodied experiences of pain, illness, pregnancy, and war to offer new readings of a distinguished group of literary artists who turned their attention to the South: Mark Twain, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Katherine Anne Porter, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Walker Percy.

In producing an intensely embodied U.S. literature these writers, Watson argues, were by turns extending and interrogating a centuries-old tradition in U.S. print culture, in which the recalcitrant materiality of the body serves as a trope for the regional alterity of the South. Reading for the Body makes a powerful case for the body as an important methodological resource for a new southern studies.

Reading for the Body

The Recalcitrant Materiality of Southern Fiction, 1893–1985

JAY WATSON

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Recalcitrant Materialities

Part One: Bodily Attributes

One. Manual Discourse: A Problem in Mark Twain’s America

Two. Listening for Zora: Voice, Body, and the Mediat(iz)ed Modernism of Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Moses, Man of the Mountain

Three. Writing Blood: The Art of the Literal in William Faulkner’s Light in August

Part Two: Embodied Experiences

Four. Richard Wright’s Parables of Pain: Uncle Tom’s Children and the Making and Unmaking of a Southern Black World

Five. Difficult Embodiment: Coming of Age in Katherine Anne Porter’s Miranda Stories

Six. Reading War on the Body: The Example of Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country

Coda. Overreading (for) the Body: Walker Percy’s Cautionary Tale

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

Any project that takes as long as this one to come to fruition is bound to incur a multitude of intellectual and personal debts along the way. I’m delighted to be able to acknowledge them here.

Numerous friends and colleagues have read and commented on portions of the manuscript, sometimes large portions. I want to thank Debra Rae Cohen, Richard Godden, Adam Gussow, John Hellmann, Abdul JanMohamed, Don Kartiganer, Barbara Ladd, John Norman, Joy Harris Philpott, Will Power, Frank Ridgway, Jesse Scott, Annette Trefzer, Joe Urgo, and Patricia Yaeger for sharing their wisdom and tactfully offering their advice—some of which I even took! Their feedback has made this book immeasurably better, though they should not of course be held accountable for the lapses that remain.

Members of the North American studies “klubi” at the University of Helsinki’s Renvall Institute for Area and Cultural Studies, the American Studies seminar at Uppsala University, and the English Department faculty-student colloquium on modernism at the University of Mississippi, along with audiences at the Southern American Studies Association, Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, and Southern Writers, Southern Writing conferences—all responded with helpful suggestions to early rehearsals of some of the arguments made in these pages. I want to express my appreciation to these generous colleagues, and acknowledge a special debt of thanks to the University of Mississippi graduate students in English and in southern studies who signed up for ENGL 676, a 1995 seminar on southern literature and the body where I first tried out a number of the ideas and approaches that have come to fruition in this study.

My deep appreciation also goes out to the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Mississippi for the semester of sabbatical leave in 1995 that allowed me to get under way with this book in earnest, for the sabbatical semester in 2009 that enabled me to complete the manuscript, and for the Faculty Research Summer Support grants in 1995, 1998, and 2001 that underwrote work on some of the individual chapters. It is a privilege to teach at an institution that not only values but actively supports scholarship in the humanities.

An early version of chapter 3 appeared in Faulkner and the Natural World: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 1996, ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 66–96. I wish to thank the University Press of Mississippi for its support of this project.

It has been a pleasure to work once again with the University of Georgia Press. I’m very grateful to Nancy Grayson, executive editor, and to Jon Smith and Riché Richardson, editors of the New Southern Studies series, for their initial interest in the manuscript and their continuing encouragement as it came along. Jon made a key suggestion about how to frame the introduction that helped clear up a number of difficulties I was having with the initial presentation of my argument, and for that I owe him special thanks. Bob Brinkmeyer and another anonymous reviewer for the press provided reports that pointed out some crucial gaps in my reading and thinking, doled out tough love where it was needed, and yet also gave me confidence about the ultimate merit of the project, for all of which I am truly grateful. I continue to benefit from the expertise of Jon Davies, Beth Snead, and everyone else at the press who has helped shepherd this book along toward publication. At every level, the press sets an impeccable standard for professionalism in scholarly publishing.

Then there are the acknowledgments of the heart. I want to thank my parents, as always, for their love, their support, and their genuine intellectual interest in my work. I look forward to the debates we will have about the South and its literatures once this book reaches your hands.

To my wife and best friend, Susan, I want to say that the only thing I have ever worked on harder than this book is the life we’ve made together for twenty-three years, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I love you for your fierce intelligence, your energy and feisty wit, and the no-nonsense outlook on life that helps me remember where my real priorities are. Every time you said, “Just finish the damn thing!”—a phrase I grew surprisingly fond of over the years, both for its refreshing directness and for the flexibility with which it could be applied to the paragraph I was trying to nail down before dinner, the chapter I was working on all summer, or the manuscript in its entirety—I always knew what you meant. And loved you for it.

Finally, this book is dedicated to my beautiful, willful, astonishing children, Katherine and Judson. It is very nearly your coeval, and I know there were times when it must have seemed the favored child. But only you are my flesh, blood, and bone.

Reading for the Body

INTRODUCTION

Recalcitrant Materialities

A Southern Double Exposure

Early in 1923, Jean Toomer published a three-part poem, a triptych of sorts titled “Georgia Portraits,” in the inaugural issue of a little magazine called Modern Review. This material resurfaced in the book Toomer would publish later that year, Cane, a foundational work of the Harlem and southern renaissances of the period. For the book, Toomer chose to break the original poem into its three constitutive parts and to place each, under a separate title, into section 1 of Cane, set in the African American world of rural central Georgia. The second of the originally linked verses appeared as the next-to-last selection in section 1’s antiphonal rhythm of poetry and prose, and it came closest to retaining the original title. Toomer called it “Portrait in Georgia”:

Hair—braided chestnut,

coiled like lyncher’s rope,

Eyes—fagots,

Lips—old scars, or the first red blisters,

Breath—the last sweet scent of cane,

And her slim body, white as the ash

of black flesh after flame. (Toomer 29)

Clearly, a reader need not look particularly far or deep to discern the presence of the human body in this poem. Its imagery consists of little more than bodily materials—specific parts and attributes. Its title announces that the poem participates in the representational conventions of the portrait genre, with its typical emphasis on the physical features of its human subject, especially those features located in the upper regions of the body: head, face, torso. For much of the history of this genre, subjects were drawn from social and cultural elites: portraits were largely reserved for those with the economic means to commission them and the leisure time to sit through the lengthy and labor-intensive process of artistic reproduction. The subject of Toomer’s portrait appears, at least on first inspection, to be such an elite figure. After some initial indeterminacy, the poem closes with lines that reveal this figure to be female and white, and the allusion to “her slim body” hints at that element of “miniaturization” that, in Patricia Yaeger’s influential critique (Dirt and Desire 128–140), denotes even as it discounts the privileged class position of the white lady. Moreover, as the poem’s title reminds us, this is not just any white lady but a white lady “in Georgia”—a raced, gendered, classed, and regionally encoded body that in its early twentieth-century historical moment was subject to powerful and contradictory forces, extremes of entitlement, objectification, and constraint. It is also true that, by Toomer’s day, the portrait had become a popular, democratically accessible medium, with the advent first of studio and then of snapshot photography (A. Wood 77, 88–89), so that, in 1923, featuring a more demotic, vernacular subject in a portrait in Georgia would not have been unusual.¹ And such a subject does emerge on closer inspection of the poem, behind—and, more suggestively, in—the features of the white female figure in the portrait’s foreground. Toomer’s lyric thus retains traces of its original title and context: this portrait in Georgia actually contains two “Georgia portraits” in a body-centered double exposure that itself doubles as a mode of southern exposure.

This becomes clearer when we contemplate the poem’s equally vexed relationship to another intensely body-oriented representational form, the poetic genre of the blazon. Typically a short lyric celebrating, and sometimes also addressed to, the speaker’s beloved, the blazon proceeds to catalog, one by one, the most desirable, memorable physical features of its subject and to linger, lovingly and sometimes leeringly, over the subject’s distinctive charms. “Portrait in Georgia” offers just this sort of itemized inventory—hair, eyes, lips, white skin—and thereby threatens to reduce its fair subject to a ludicrous collection of dismembered physical fragments, in an inadvertently anatomizing effect that has rendered the blazon vulnerable throughout its history to parody and self-parody. Toomer, however, goes beyond parody. As the poem elaborates on the emblazoned attributes of its subject, it begins to turn monstrous, to morph into a grotesque hybrid linking the precious body of the southern white woman first to the basic equipment and then to the bodily damage of spectacle lynching, as lynch rope and burning coals yield to scarred, blistered flesh and finally to the human ashes that drift earthward from the bonfire’s flame—to become, perhaps, like the “pyramidal sawdust pile” that smolders through several of Cane’s other vignettes of Georgia. With this transformation, the poem’s double exposure emerges in full; the conventional portrait blurs into the more gruesome visual genre of the lynching photograph, which Shawn Michelle Smith has described as “the shadow image embedded in the white middle-class portrait” in the turn-of-the-century United States (Photography 118).²

As Smith (Photography 115–118; “Evidence” 14–17); Dora Apel (44–46, 54–56); Jacqueline Goldsby (214–281); Grace Elizabeth Hale (229–230); Katherine Henninger (36–39); Amy Louise Wood (74–76); and others have shown, lynching photography helps reveal the thoroughly modern, rather than the “barbaric” or atavistic, nature of spectacle lynching, with its direct ties to sophisticated capitalist networks of transportation, communication, representation, and consumption. The photographs, which were often made by local or itinerant professional portrait photographers who made a point to be on the scene, were printed and sold as quickly and widely as they could be distributed. On occasion they were mass-produced and circulated as postcards (Goldsby 263–278; A. Wood 107), part of a diverse and horrifying class of “souvenirs”—whether commodities or other mementos, including body parts from the victims—that turned African American suffering and death into a source of consumer pleasure for whites both in and beyond the U.S. South. Moreover, as a quick, painful tour through James Allen et al.’s Without Sanctuary collection reveals, the slim bodies of white women are often present in lynching photographs, which frequently depict the victims flanked or surrounded by lynchers and onlookers, sometimes throngs of them (see, for instance, Allen et al. figs. 10, 22, 23, 25, 31, 38, 57, 97; Anthony Lee fig. 1).³ This in turn raises the possibility that Toomer’s “portrait” in Georgia simply is a lynching photograph, in which a slim white figure stands off to one side, or perhaps in the foreground, as a witness to (and participant in) a spectacle that, in ways she may not be fully aware of, defines, constructs, and disciplines her.

At first, “Portrait in Georgia” endeavors to manage the gruesome homology between bodies and their respective visual genres—to create a kind of buffer, impose a reassuring distance, between the poem’s incongruous elements—by orthographic means, with full dashes separating the tersely, dispassionately rendered insignia of southern feminine beauty from the violent phraseology that so disturbingly annotates them. The effect is similar to, perhaps a forerunner of, the “lenticular” logic that Tara McPherson sees at work in later, post–Civil Rights–era “economies of visibility” (25), juxtaposing without relating images of white and black in pursuit of a separatist agenda of visual and racial “partition[ing]” (28). Now you see her, now you see him—but in a flicking, back-and-forth movement ac...

Table of contents

• Reading for the Body