AAVV - Unsteadily Marching on the U.S. South Motion

In an essay which sheds light on the ordeal of mobility in southern literature and culture, Jacques Pothier deals with the tension between the home and the road, staying and going, with going as the only available option to dispossessed picaros , the questing “kids” that abound in southern literature. In Cormac MacCarthy’s The Road , where we find the child with his father, in a world irrevocably deprived of human values, the pattern of the picaresque is reduced to its bare essentials, and in this novel McCarthy continues a pattern present in his earlier novels, in which young people “ride on,” preferably south, as do the two protagonists of All the Pretty Horses , John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlings, who “took the road South such road as it was,” as if they were later-day versions of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. What they encounter in Mexico is, according to Pothier, a Hispanic South which “is made the museum of what is left of the West. It is a South whose alien, exotic quality is underlined by the use of the Spanish language in retranscribed dialogue.”

Section III straddles questions of both literature and film. The South has long been one of the main sources of inspiration for the Hollywood film industry. Motion pictures are eloquent cultural texts to read not only about how southerners conceive of themselves and their region, but also how the rest of America perceives and portrays the southern imaginary. In his analysis of a little-known film adaptation of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury , directed by Martin Ritt in 1959, Thomas Inge discusses the difficulties of translating to the screen one of the greatest 20 th-century American novels, one which has no plot as such and is told by multiple narrators. Producer Terry Wald took it as an intriguing challenge and tried hard to translate the spirit and essence of the original in visual terms, with results that were less than satisfactory. Wald placed Caddy’s rebellion and the life of her unhappy daughter Miss Quentin at the center, with Miss Quentin as the film narrator; Faulkner’s story of family tragedy, incest and dissolution ended up as an ordinary, though odd, love story, in which Quentin’s suicide is concealed and Caddy is made to return home, thus rendering Faulkner’s darling female rebel into a southern belle like Blanche Dubois, and redirecting the plot towards conventional romance. The Hollywood star system imposed Yul Brynner to fill the role of Jason Compson, and in view of his accented English and his Russian/Swiss/Mongolian appearance, the screen writer made him a Cajun from Louisiana. The result was a movie suggested by the novel, rather than an adaptation of Faulkner’s masterpiece. With movie adaptations, the question is not faithfulness to the original but if the film is good on its own merits. According to Inge, “This one fails on both counts” but “it remains a peculiar film with its own sense of failing grace.”

In her essay, Urzsula Niewiadomska-Flis takes us on a luscious culinary journey across the color line, examining along the way the intricate connections between food and race in literary and filmic texts as representative as The Last Gentleman, Driving Miss Daisy, Passion Fish, Can’t Quit You, Baby and Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café . Niewiadomska-Flis analyzes different spaces and contact zones connected to the discourse of food and domesticity, spaces which become the site of complex negotiations of race and gender. The pantry, the kitchen, the dining room or the diner all help southerners in their attempts to fathom themselves and the racial other. Food production and consumption can highlight racial divisions and also heal them through the reconciliatory potential of food, which overturns hierarchical relationships, as we see in Passion Fish and Can’t Quit You, Baby. In the texts analyzed by Niewiadomska-Flis food preparation and consumption allow characters to re-consider or go beyond pre-conceived notions of a racist system which is transcended through personal involvement and connection. Through food the domestic acquires a crucial political dimension, and in Fried Green Tomatoes two women who exhibit unconventional sexual practices challenge political and economic hierarchies by controlling their access to food.

Beata Zawadka in her contribution dives into the notion of “Elvis culture” and its significance for the South and its identity, as well as for American democracy and culture more broadly. Zawadka draws on the view held by Erica Doss and others that “Elvis culture” erupts as a multifarious, elastic and enigmatic phenomenon that resembles America when she puts on her choicest democratic attire. “Elvis culture” also generates fascinating debates about notions of contemporary southern democracy and its questionable potential for rebellion and diversification. Zawadka uses the theory of performance to interpret one of the most neglected elements of the above mentioned culture, the Elvis movies (or else, as she puts it, the idea of the “filmmaking Elvis”) as a “uniformly (un)cultured” question, hoping that this “will allow us in the first place to play this idea out as simultaneously reflecting and resisting what can be called the ‘dominant’ Elvis ideology.” What results is a complex analysis of a performative – thus “(un)critical” – rendition of southern identity as portrayed in three Presley movies – Love Me Tender, Harum Scarum , and Change of Habit – which constitute an instructive barometer of the ever-changing cultural and socio-political face of the South and of the whole nation.

Few historical turns contributed more than the civil rights movement to changing the South, both individually and collectively. The days when walking and sitting in were potent political statements clearly left an indelible mark on the history and the literature of the region. In the first essay of section IV, Elizabeth Hayes Turner traces the development and re-appraises the reverberations of the Poor People’s Campaign, a logical economic extension of the civil rights movement, organized in 1968 by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, including Martin Luther King, Jr. This momentous event which sprang from the strike of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, concluded with between 3,000 and 5,000 of the nation’s destitute moving to Washington DC where they lived temporarily in “Resurrection City,” a compound of makeshift dwellings on the National Mall. It was a more inclusive project than any previous civil rights initiative, in that the SCLC brought into the pilgrimage African Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, Appalachian poor whites and Puerto Ricans. The aim was to make Americans pay attention to those who had previously been invisible and excluded from the Dream and to make them aware that even in the prosperous 1960s there was considerable poverty, directly attributable to the nation’s history of exclusion of the racial other and to the squandering of money in the imperialistic war in Vietnam. Although most historians, led by the negative press coverage of the time, consider the campaign a failure, Turner argues that the PPC actually gave rise to a number of groups and initiatives that continued to fight and to change misguided federal practices. The greatest impact, though, was not on Congress or the Government but on the many activists and the participants themselves, who undertook to carry the flame and continued the fight to raise awareness among the poor and the disadvantaged. As Turner sustains, “out of the radicalizing experience of the Poor People’s Campaign emerged participant leaders who channeled their energy into a virulent anti-war movement, identity politics of the 1970s, and into lasting support mechanisms for distressed children.”