H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Southern-Lit@h-net.msu.edu (July 2008)

Richard Gray. _A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern
Literature_. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007. xii + 283 pp.
Notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8203-3005-1.

Reviewed for H-Southern-Lit by Grant Bain, Department of English,
University of Arkansas

Beyond Boundaries: The Global Dimensions of Southern Literature

Richard Gray's _A Web of Words_ covers a vast range of southern
writing to produce an impressive study of both canonical or nearly
canonical writers, such as William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Toni
Morrison, and Bobbie Ann Mason, and lesser-known authors, including
poet Yusef Komunyakaa; rediscovered slave writer Hannah Crafts; and
Vietnamese American writers Wayne Karlin, Robert Olen Butler, Mary
Gardner, and Lan Cao. While Gray assumes from his audience a general
acquaintance with the field, even newcomers to southern studies should
find _A Web of Words_ accessible and convincing.

_A Web of Words_, like much of the best new southern studies, situates
southern writers beyond the boundaries of their region. Like Leigh
Anne Duck's _The Nation's Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and
U.S. Nationalism_ (2006), Deborah Cohn's _History and Memory in the
Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction_ (1999), and
the collection _South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture_
(2002) edited by Suzanne Jones and Sharon Monteith, _A Web of Words_
explores the ways in which southern writers speak to each other and to
other writers on the national and international stages. By examining
and comparing southern writers' portrayals of events (the Civil War
and Vietnam War), ideas (agrarianism and slavery), and even each
other, Gray reveals the ongoing and often intentional discussion in
which these authors engage. In Gray's analysis, Mason and Komunyakaa
respond to Faulkner's portrayal of the Civil War by expressing their
own feelings about Vietnam, and slave narratives are not only
reactions to agrarian writing but also rebuttals to it, in a
continuous and deliberate conversation.

Gray amply demonstrates that southern writing is not merely a matter
of influence, or of negotiating, as Flannery O'Connor wrote, "'the
same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down'" (p. 11). Instead, Gray
argues, all southern writers engage in constant conversation with
those before and after them, both inside and outside the South.
Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin, Gray characterizes southern writing as "a
history of creative, dialogic conflict," composed of myriad voices
echoing and responding to each other across history and region (p. 3).
His opening chapter, "The Great Dialogue: Imagining Disaster,"
explores texts concerning trauma and defeat. Using the Civil War and
Vietnam War as historical vantage points, Gray examines the ways in
which different writers interrogate each other across generational,
racial, and gender lines concerning methods of dealing with cultural
trauma. Although this chapter incorporates numerous canonical writers,
such as Faulkner and O'Connor, as context, Gray focuses mainly on a
few texts to demonstrate the continuous discussion of trauma,
particularly trauma inherited by descendants of soldiers. His closest
readings are reserved for a pair of authors writing from opposite
sides of the color line, Mason and Komunyakaa, whose writings Gray
argues negotiate the Vietnam War much as Faulkner and other canonical
writers dealt with the Civil War. Gray first juxtaposes the traumatic
feelings engendered in white southerners by the Civil War and in black
southerners by slavery and its fallout, and then uses the Vietnam War
as a point of triangulation to demonstrate similar ways in which more
contemporary southerners, black and white, deal with shared traumatic
experiences.

Chapter 2, "Pastoral and Antipastoral: Rewriting Agrarianism,"
explores the conflicts among early advocates of agrarianism concerning
slavery, capitalism, and progress, and then juxtaposes their texts
with slave narratives, the Nashville Agrarians' _I'll Take My Stand_
(1930), and more contemporary writers, like Wendell Berry, whose
negotiations of agrarian ideas breathes fresh life into the older
texts.[1] Gray's chapter title derives from the pastoral mode of
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century agrarian writers and the
antipastoral mode of slave narratives, which he turns into an
impressively nuanced meditation on varying modes of agrarianism. The
main distinction lies between what Gray calls "elegiac" and
"prophetic" agrarianism (p. 141). The Nashville Agrarians are his
prime examples of the elegiac group, whose work laments the passing of
the agrarian ideal. Gray further characterizes these writers as
traditionalists (Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn
Warren), who believed in feudal agrarian values; and regionalists
(Donald Davidson and Andrew Nelson Lytle), who believed the agrarian
movement might actually triumph over encroaching capitalism. By
further subdividing the elegiac agrarians, Gray demonstrates the
arguments and conflicts nourished among writers sharing similar
ideologies. Gray contrasts these writers with Berry, whose writing
Gray argues constitutes a "prophetic" agrarianism, in which twenty-
first-century communities can reclaim some of the useful agrarian
ideals, by supporting local business and buying locally produced food
products, but dispensing with ideas of paternalism and feudal
hierarchy. By dividing agrarianism into so many subcategories, Gray
reveals the complex dialectic at the heart of a seemingly reactionary
impulse, reviving the agrarian conversation.

Finally, in "Intertextualities: Writing across Borders," Gray examines
dialogue between southern writers and writers from outside the South
concerning race and dispossession. He begins the chapter with a close
exploration of Welty, followed by an extended comparison of Faulkner
and Morrison, and finishes by examining several Vietnamese writers
living in the South since the Vietnam War. This chapter is, in some
ways, the most salient, as it begins to discuss southern writing in a
much broader (national and transnational) context; in yet other
regards, Gray's final chapter provides the least cohesive discussion
in the book, focusing on various discussions that seem to have little
to do with each other. In discussing Welty, Gray centers largely on
_The Robber Bridegroom_ (1943) to demonstrate Welty's borrowing from
myth and fairly tale, but he seems to do so only to show her extra-
regional significance. He then jumps to a comparison of Morrison's
_Beloved_ (1987) with several of Faulkner's works, arguing that her
writing fills in gaps in discussions carried on among white writers.
[2] This particular discussion is well executed, as Gray places
_Beloved_ into the national discourse on race, arguing that through
Morrison, "the voiceless are given a voice" in the great tradition of
American literature (p. 218). Gray's final discussion attempts to
illuminate another "voiceless" people, and, in the process, returns to
his original argument, again using the two wars for historical
counterpoints. By examining several texts by Vietnamese American
writers living in the South, Gray broadly contextualizes a southern
emphasis on exile and return.[3] By carving out their own niches in
the new land they inhabit, Gray argues, these writers demonstrate
desire for place and belonging that transcends region and even nation.
That these writers settled and wrote in the South suggests that
southern soil is particularly fertile for such conversations. Gray
concludes the chapter and book by arguing that southern writing "has
consistently been produced by those who resisted the monolith," and
argues for the continuing importance of southern writers' resistance
in contemporary global culture (p. 244).

Characteristically, the strength of _A Web of Words_ flows from Gray's
comprehensive knowledge of southern writing. Although he openly
declares no intention to provide an exhaustive survey, the texts he
analyzes and those with which he contextualizes them are from such
diverse writers, time periods, and genres that his argument's broad
applicability is virtually unassailable. Indeed, he seeds his close
readings of a few texts with allusions to numerous other works,
thereby adding additional voices to his argument. In doing so, Gray
not only demonstrates the great dialogue of southern literature, but
enters that dialogue as well, and makes room for others to do the same.

The most disappointing aspect of _A Web of Words_ is its lack of a
clear forward trajectory. At the most recent conference of the Society
for the Study of Southern Literature, Jon Smith mentioned the "ruts"
into which southern writers and critics can potentially fall, one of
which is venerating and constantly rehashing traditional issues in
traditional ways. Although Gray's book does not fall into these ruts,
he skirts the precipices by depicting writers who seem to do so.
Particularly in his first and last chapters, Gray suggests that
certain issues and traumas--war (Civil and Vietnam) and slavery--are
inescapable from the perspective of southern letters. He aptly
demonstrates methods by which newer (or newly discovered or
rediscovered) writers can enter into dialogue on these issues, but
none of his argument seems to suggest the possibility of escaping
these issues, or of using newer dialogue about them to achieve a
fresher perspective on the present and future. If, as Gray argues, new
writers "have moved out of the texts and traditions of the past and
then circuitously, strangely, back into them again," what have these
new writers accomplished (p. 59)? He may show ways in which Morrison's
perspective as an African American woman engages with Faulkner's
worldview as a white man, but how does exploring these writers'
discussions and cultural pasts contribute to any understanding of a
shared cultural present or future?

Perhaps these shortcomings are reflective not of any critical
inadequacies on Gray's part, but rather of certain cultural
preoccupations with race, place, gender, and specific historical
events prevalent in particular writers, and perhaps more generally in
the cultural landscape of the South. Gray's stated purpose in _A Web
of Words_, which I believe he largely fulfills, is to "offer ... a
series of notes toward an understanding of the different layers of
intertextuality at work in any southern story, poem, or play" (p. x).
However, he also mentions "the ripples of conversation that flow out
from the local to the regional to the national and the transnational,"
ripples that bear more investigating than Gray offers in this book (p.
x). Southernists increasingly question the validity of such notions as
"place," "region," and even "the South" itself, and perhaps one way to
understand the value of southern writing is not only to trace its
contribution to "national and the transnational" conversations, but
also to examine what the South brings home from this discussion.


[1] These early writers include among others Sir Humphrey Gilbert,
Hugh Jones, William Byrd, and Thomas Jefferson, who wrote _History and
Present State of Virginia_ (1722), _Present State of Virginia_ (1724),
_The History of the Dividing Line twixt Virginia and South Carolina_
(1729, not published until 1841), and _Notes on the State of Virginia_
(1787), respectively.
[2] Gray specifically mentions Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, in
addition to Faulkner.
[3] Gray's detailed discussion is of Wayne Karlin's _Lost Armies_
(1988) and _Prisoners_ (1997), Robert Olen Butler's _A Good Scent from
a Strange Mountain_ (1992), Mary Gardner's _Boat People_ (1995), and
Lan Cao's _Monkey Bridge_ (1997).

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