PARTISAN REVIEW
287
an extravagant claim for a novel generally dismissed as a slick pot–
pourri of overheated sex and grotesque violence, but there is more to
Eternal Fire.
As its first paragraph suggests, the novel assembled all the
conventions and cliches of Southern Gothic, exaggerated them to out–
landish dimensions, and roasted them to a fare-thee-weII.
Eternal Fire
did to the "Southern novel" what
Portnoy's Complaint
did to the "Jew–
ish novel:" it subjected a once-distinguished but
w~thering
Literary tra–
dition to merciless, devastating parody. At the same time, it implicitly
raised the question: What comes next?
The question, which has concerned serious Southern writers for
quite a while, reflects the gradual disappearance of "the South" itself,
a change of which Flannery O'Connor wrote: "The anguish that most of
us have observed for some time now has been caused not by the fact
that the South is alienated from the rest of the country, but by the fact
that it is not alienated enough, that every day we are getting more and
more like the rest of the country, that we are being forced out not only
of our many sins, but of our few virtues." Those "few virtues" formed
the bedrock upon which rested the great Southern fiction of the quarter
century following the 1929 publication of Faulkner's first Yoknapa–
tawpha novel,
Sartoris.
They took different forms in the hands of dif–
ferent novelists
(and
poets, essayists, and historians), but they can be
summed up
in
three "senses:" of place, of
commun~ty,
of history.
The distinction between place and community is narrow, and in–
deed the two are interdependent: the one is physical space and climate,
the other is the people who inhabit it. In the South that Faulkner's
generation knew, place had a meaning foreign to most other Americans.
People were born, lived and died in one place; they had what Eudora
Welty has called "the blessing of being located - contained," and they
were contained within a land and climate that colored the patterns of
their lives and minds. The murky red clay, the heavy vegetation, the
burning heat, the heavy rains - all were inescapable. The physical en–
vironment was part of the psychological landscape.
The life of the Southern town and countryside was a web of en–
during, intimate human relationships. In a brilliant discussion of the
Southern novelists, C . Vann Woodward has pointed to "their way of
treating man not as an individual alone with his conscience or his God,
as the New Englanders were inclined to do, or alone at sea with a
whale or a marlin, or alone in a ring with a bull, but as an inextricable
part of a living history and community, attached and determined in a
thousand ways
by
other wills and destinies he has only heard about."
In the best of the Southern novels, the community itself is a character;
