Southwestern humor is perhaps the most intriguing of
southern antebellum literary genres, for writers of this loose-knit "
school,"
often contributors to sporting or gentlemen's magazines, abandoned the
plantation setting entirely and envisioned the South as an indeterminate
space of unstable and shifting boundaries. Indeed the salient slogan for
the South delineated by this genre are the words of Captain Simon Suggs,
the 1845 creation of
Johnson
Jones Hooper: "It is good to be shifty in a new country."
The genre of southwestern humor is the first of a long, somewhat controversial
tradition in southern literature, one that Richard Gray describes as "a
familiar path in Southern writing, in search of the raw and marginal,
disrupted lives presented in a deliberately disruptive way." Interestingly,
Gray uses this description of the genre in a book called
Southern
Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism
(2000) and in a chapter on "Fiction Writing and Social Change."
Gray understands the irony of the word "aberration," its message
that the canonized "southern" writing has not taken this path
into the "raw," and that the writing that has taken this disruptive
turn is notaccepted as "southern"—not indicative of some
uniform perception of the regional identity.
Southwestern humor constituted a large body of antebellum writing, often
collected into books from magazine sketches and easily recognizable through
the presence of familiar generic conventions: the clash of upper and lower-class,
backwoods characters; heavy vernacular dialect; ludicrous or crudely comic
situations often involving violence; trickster figures; local lore and
rural community customs. Although the southwestern humorists were generally
well-placed southern gentlemen, what happens in southwestern humor is
an energetic process that destabilizes as well as it demarcates regionality.
The South is seen as a moving target, progressing continuously into uncharted
frontier territory, its center continually pressed towards uneasy edges,
its safe, established mental contours confronting increasingly crude,
disrespectful threats. Southwestern humorists were pioneers of southern
resistance literature who, to varying degrees, debunked notions of class
privilege upon which much southern pastoral has been constructed. We come
closer to understanding this literature when we compare it to the twentieth
century genres that it influenced: the "southern gothic" attributed
to
William
Faulkner, the "Grotesque" of
Flannery
O'Connor, and the "grit" works of writers such as
Cormac
McCarthy,
Harry
Crews, and
Larry
Brown. Even before the nineteenth century ended, southwestern humor
gave shapes and narrative strategies to
Mark
Twain, providing him with instructive models for contesting the emerging
white racist power structure of Post-Reconstruction.
Using subversive trickster humor, the southwestern humorists of antebellum
times displaced the traditional gentleman, supplanting him not with a
counter-ideal but with rugged, sometimes openly anarchist anti-heroes.
If we follow the development of the southwestern humor tale—exclusively
in its use of language—from one of its earliest successful practitioners,
Augustus
Baldwin Longstreet, to one of its last stylists in the antebellum
period,
George
Washington Harris, we see the region's social contours shift dramatically;
however we also see the genre sustain over time the function of adding
dynamic tension to the ongoing process of region bonding in the South.
Longstreet in
Georgia
Scenes, published in 1835, mastered what became the staples of
the form: skillful representation of dialect, keen interest in regional
types and customs, plot conflict involving exaggerated, comic collisions
of characters based on class and education, civilization vs. barbarity.
His narrator is the southern aristocrat. When one of his folk characters
swears, the narrator apologizes, "I should certainly omit such expressions
as this, could I do so with historic fidelity." By 1853,
Joseph
Glover Baldwin presented in
Flush
Times in Alabama and Mississippi an equally fastidious upper-class
Virginia narrator, yet one who more vocally describes the threats to his
own way of life: "how could" a jolly Virginian, Baldwin asks,
"believe that that stuttering grammarless Georgian, who had never
heard of the resolutions of '98, could beat him in a land trade."
Baldwin is sarcastically calling attention here to the traditional Cavalier's
faith that his accoutrements, including language proficiency, constituted
an unassailable power base against "stuttering and grammarless,"
i.e. culturally deficient challengers. Self-consciousness about
language is one of the most important motifs of southwestern humor. Standard
English, which in a properly ordered world should constitute privilege,
in the South conceived as border region is little more than a very inadequate
shield against abrupt change.
This warning to those who hide behind the King's English is given its
most ribald expression by one of the last antebellum southwestern humorists,
George Washington Harris, whose
Sut
Lovingood: Yarn Spun by a ‘Nat'ral Born Durn'd Fool, was published
in book form only after the Civil War in 1867. Gone is the genteel narrator.
Harris gives us neither the reality nor the pretense of the manners and
ethics of the South's literary mainstay, the southern gentleman. The well-educated,
refined, righteous frame narrator barely has a toehold here, for the chief
narrative duties fall to Sut Lovingood himself, an illiterate, unemployed
(and unemployable) descendant of
William
Byrd’s 18th century Lubberlanders. Sut's dialect is barely decipherable,
his stories are full of crude reference to whores and excrement, and his
disdain for his betters is clearly his main objective.
In the opening conversation of the story "
Mrs.
Yardley’s Quilting," the gentlemanly narrator asks Sut to explain
a "muddy job" he has been talking about. Sut says he has been
"helping tu salt ole Missis Yardley down," and because this
metaphor makes no sense to his listener, he obligingly goes into more
detail: "Fixin her fur rotten cumfurtably, kiverin her up wif sile,
tu keep the buzzards from cheatin the wurms." "Oh," says
the gentleman, "you have been helping to bury a woman." "That’s
hit, by golly!," replies Sut. "Now why the devil can't I 'splain
mysef like yu? I ladles out my words at randum, like a calf kickin at
yaller-jackids; yu jis' rolls em out to the pint, like a feller a-layin
bricks—every one fits." Yet in spite of Sut's dubious flattery
of his companion's linguistic skills, it is his own dialect that takes
over, full of cursing, invective, crudity, and sexual puns. Sut's pretense
of self-deprecation mocks his erudite companion and the sterile formality
of the culture that his genteel diction reflects.
The rude language of the southwestern humor genre makes visible and viable
the threatening possibility that a new "breed" of southerner
might refuse to conform to convention or respectability. The writers of
the tales were certainly themselves by and large elitist, yet in the stories
they produced they consistently give a platform to "other" southerners
who expose hypocrisy and pretense with borderland impunity. The tales
are as morally ambiguous as the slave society that they never directly
describe, much less challenge, yet they speak dramatically to the vital
forces of revolution and social change that were a part of every corner
of their region, certainly not just the backwoods that is their metaphorical
"new country."
Southwestern humor, seen generically as a Literature of Resistance, has
produced a line that has shown remarkable durability. From Mark Twain
to Charles Chesnutt, from Faulkner to
Erskine
Caldwell, from Flannery O'Connor to Harry Crews, from
Dorothy
Allison to
Ishmael
Reed—we are able to trace and celebrate the southern writer’s
capacity to resist unexamined norms that allow any system of dominance
to roll on unchallenged. These resistant literatures, with greater impact
than southern literary history has yet acknowledged, have long been "keeping
the buzzards from cheatin' the wurms," as Sut might say.
