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PARTISAN REVIEW
westerners in Eastern colleges going home for Christmas. And
if
we ask what is so remarkable about that sense of place which is, after
all, essential to imaginative writing, the answer is that we Americans
are in fact just the opposite of the homogeneous mass we are always
trying to be, and that what distinguishes American writing is exactly
the fact that we are strangers to each other and that each writer
describes his own world to strangers living in the same land with
himself.
Now of all parts of the United States the South is certainly the
strangest to the others; it is, in fact-or used to be-a separate na–
tion. And almost all the good Southern writers have this sense of
local color to an extreme, for to the same degree that the South is
what it is because of its rural background, its "backwardness," its
isolation, its comparatively homogeneous white population, to this
same extent does the American need to value and venerate one's
own region or place as the only escape from American bigness,
American smoothness, American abstractness, American slogans, the
juggernaut of American progress, find (at least it used to find) its
deepest expression in the South. Even poverty, which in America
certainly is a disgrace, becomes in Southern writing a sign of the
natural man (Huckleberry Finn) or the earth-mother (Lena Grove).
And, as so often happens in Southern writing-for the sensitive
Southerners are likely to feel that they are lost in the modern indus–
trial world and, in mourning their traditional homeland, to see the
immediate world around them as damned-Faulkner's pictures of
the impersonal modern world, the opposite of Lena's sacred grove,
are lurid.
As
Lena is all fertility, the others are all barrenness. De–
struction, fire, obsession, inhumanity, anonymity, the "frictionsmooth"
wooden counter at which Joe Christmas eats, the hard cold eyes of
Bobbie the prostitute and Marne the madam and Max the pimp:
these against the images of locality, the farmers in their faded and
patched but clean overalls, and of time, the wagon along the road
and the "heelgnawed porch" of the country store around which the
farmers sit.
As
soon as we get to Jefferson, we catch the typical
dialectic of life and anti-life, the contrast of birth and destruction
on which the book is founded, in the fact that the slow patient
rhythms of Lena, the wagon, the road, are immediately followed by
the whine of the saw in the planing mill, the reiteration of
smooth.
