The Mere Region
from the The Seventeenth Southern Writers Symposium
Robert Jackson, University of Virginia
Robert Jackson, University of Virginia
Essay Sections:
Introduction |
Eliot's Homogeneity | Defining
Region | "The Ordinary Business
of Living" | Southern Writers Symposium
Eliot's Homogeneity:
T. S. Eliot, delivering the 1933 Page-Barbour lecture at the University of Virginia, articulated his own regional ideal, what he envisioned as "the re-establishment of a native culture" in the South:
May I say that my first, and no doubt superficial impressions of
your country — I speak as a New Englander — have
strengthened my feeling of sympathy with [the Nashville Agrarians
of I'll
Take My Stand].... I think that the chances for the re-establishment
of a native culture are perhaps better here than in New England.
You
are farther away from New York; you have been less industrialized and
less invaded by foreign races...
A bit later in the same address Eliot clarified the best qualities of this new "native culture," in a passage that has, for obvious reasons, drawn charges of anti-Semitism. Prominent among these qualities, and inseparable from Eliot's elitism, is like-mindedness:
The population should be homogeneous…reasons of race and religion combine
to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable…. And a spirit
of excessive tolerance is to be deprecated.
Eliot's attitude toward Jews is offensive enough in its own right.
But looking across some of the events that have taken place since
1933 —
not just the Holocaust but, in America and the South, civil rights
and integration, and in our field of literary studies these past several
decades,
an assault on
the canon that would have sent Eliot scurrying back to London as fast
as British Airways could take him, the ongoing reconsideration of
literary value that has
given solid footing to African American literature and theory, and
the emergence of postcolonial, transnational, and other multicultural
critical discourses —
in light of these events, Eliot's dream of a "homogeneous" region seems almost
unbearably rigid, not just in its well-maintained hierarchies but
also, and even
more untenably, in the very composition of its human community. In
these passages Eliot brings to mind black and white images of the
lone white woman riding the
bus in Montgomery in 1955, surrounded by empty seats, ignoring the
boycott, and largely ignored, to our eyes today, by history itself.
With this historical consciousness in mind, it is the collective identity of this supposedly organic community —the region— that requires clarification and redefinition. This is the moment to stop simply using the "we" that carries so much meaning precisely because it leaves so much unsaid. An appropriately American way to throw off the tyranny of like-mindedness would be to speak in individual terms, of "I" rather than "we." In Eliot's case, the "I" behind his regional "we" is profoundly revealing, and, perhaps not surprisingly in light of his background, deeply American. For despite his self-identification above as a New Englander, which he made, I think, largely as a rhetorical device to contrast the industrialized Northeast with what he wanted to view as a pastoral, even Edenic, South, Eliot was in truth a Missourian, that most existentially challenging of all American identities. Like those of Samuel Clemens before him, Eliot's life and writings show deep traces of ambivalence about his early background. Did his family's New England ties qualify him, vicariously, as a Yankee? Not according to his boarding school classmates back East, who mocked him for his heavy drawl and motivated him to shed all traces of his Missouri accent and, in the long run, to adopt the Queen's English. And yet surely Eliot, who had grown up in the cosmopolitan industrial city of St. Louis, where his grandfather had been the most outspoken abolitionist in the state, could not identify himself as a southerner? Or perhaps the open spaces of the frontier West a few blocks from his home held the keys to his identity? Clemens, according to his quixotic nature, at times embraced the West; Eliot, with a lifelong determination almost worthy of Thomas Sutpen, fled from it.
With this historical consciousness in mind, it is the collective identity of this supposedly organic community —the region— that requires clarification and redefinition. This is the moment to stop simply using the "we" that carries so much meaning precisely because it leaves so much unsaid. An appropriately American way to throw off the tyranny of like-mindedness would be to speak in individual terms, of "I" rather than "we." In Eliot's case, the "I" behind his regional "we" is profoundly revealing, and, perhaps not surprisingly in light of his background, deeply American. For despite his self-identification above as a New Englander, which he made, I think, largely as a rhetorical device to contrast the industrialized Northeast with what he wanted to view as a pastoral, even Edenic, South, Eliot was in truth a Missourian, that most existentially challenging of all American identities. Like those of Samuel Clemens before him, Eliot's life and writings show deep traces of ambivalence about his early background. Did his family's New England ties qualify him, vicariously, as a Yankee? Not according to his boarding school classmates back East, who mocked him for his heavy drawl and motivated him to shed all traces of his Missouri accent and, in the long run, to adopt the Queen's English. And yet surely Eliot, who had grown up in the cosmopolitan industrial city of St. Louis, where his grandfather had been the most outspoken abolitionist in the state, could not identify himself as a southerner? Or perhaps the open spaces of the frontier West a few blocks from his home held the keys to his identity? Clemens, according to his quixotic nature, at times embraced the West; Eliot, with a lifelong determination almost worthy of Thomas Sutpen, fled from it.
Essay Sections:
Introduction |
Eliot's Homogeneity | Defining
Region | "The Ordinary Business
of Living" | Southern Writers Symposium
