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Outside the Southern Myth, by Noel Polk
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Noel Polk, the Faulkner scholar and academician, is a native of the small Mississippi city of Picayune. In his career as an international scholar and traveler and in his role as a teacher and a professor of literature he has moved beyond his origins while continuing to be nourished by his hometown roots. Like many other southern men he doesn't fit the outside world's stereotype of the southern male.
"I almost invariably see myself depicted in the media as either a beer-drinking meanspirited pickup-driving redneck racist, a julep-sipping plantation-owning kindhearted benevolent racist, or, at best, a nonracist good ole boy, one of several variations of Forrest Gump, good-hearted and retarded, who makes his way in the modern world not because he is intelligent but because he's - well, good hearted."
In Outside the Southern Myth Polk offers an apologia for a huge segment of southern males and communities that don't belong in the media portraits. His town was not antebellum. There were no plantations. No Civil War battles were fought there. It had little racial divisiveness. It was one of the thousands that mushroomed along the railroads as a response to logging and milling industries. It was mainly middle-class, not reactionary or exclusive.
While evoking both the pleasures and the problems of his past-band trips, a yearning for cityscapes, religious conversion, awakening to the realities of fundamentalist fervor- Polk offers himself, his family, and his town to exemplify an aspect that is more American than southern and a tradition that is not mired in the past.
As he explores the ways in which his experience of the South defined him, he concludes that his life has been experienced in a parallel universe, not in a time warp. He and many like him exist outside the southern myth.
Noel Polk is the author of Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner (University Press of Mississippi) and editor of the Reading Faulkner Series and of eleven Faulkner texts for Random House, The Library of America, and Vintage International.
- Sales Rank: #2769501 in eBooks
- Published on: 1997-09-01
- Released on: 1997-07-31
- Format: Kindle eBook
From the Inside Flap
A southern male’s forthright view of himself and of the real-life small-town culture that made him
From the Back Cover
Like many other southern men Noel Polk doesn't fit the outside world's stereotype of the southern male. This notable Faulkner critic is a native of the small Mississippi city of Picayune. In his career as an international scholar and traveler and in his role as a teacher and a professor of literature he has moved beyond his origins while continuing to be nourished by his hometown roots. In Outside the Southern Myth Polk offers an apologia for a huge segment of southern males and communities that don't belong in the media portraits. His town was not antebellum. There were no plantations. No Civil War battles were fought there. It had little racial divisiveness. It was one of the thousands that mushroomed along the railroads as a response to logging and milling industries. It was mainly middle-class, not reactionary or exclusive. While evoking both the pleasures and the problems of his past - band trips, a yearning for cityscapes, religious conversion, awakening to the realities of fundamentalist fervor - Polk offers himself, his family, and his town to exemplify an aspect that is more "American" than "Southern" and a tradition that is not mired in the past.
About the Author
Noel Polk is professor emeritus of English at Mississippi State University and editor of "The Mississippi Quarterly". He is the author, most recently, of "Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition" (University Press of Mississippi). From 1981 to 2006, he edited the Library of America's complete edition of William Faulkner's novels.
Noel Polk is professor emeritus of English at Mississippi State University and editor of "The Mississippi Quarterly". He is the author, most recently, of "Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition" (University Press of Mississippi). From 1981 to 2006, he edited the Library of America's complete edition of William Faulkner's novels.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Unworthy of print
By gi
If you are looking for an informed critique of the so-called Southern Myth, this book is not for you. It is a rambling, lacrymose, autobiographical account of what the writer, who grew up in a little town in southwestern MS, claims is a life untouched by the culture traditionally understood as Southern. The book lacks a clear purpose, requires the reader to wade through repetitious and muddy prose, and in the end, reaches no meaningful conclusion. A good editor would not have permitted it to go to the printer.
Polk relies on the description of the South found in popular media to define what he calls the Southern Myth. Thus, he sets up a world beyond which most Southerners have always lived. Anyone familiar with the historical, cultural, and geographical scholarship of the region in the last half of the twentieth century recognizes the hollowness of the vision of the South as a world of white-columed mansions and shotgun houses, plantations and sharecroppers, churches and racial lynchings, good old boys and cotillion queens, with a tortured history of loss and racial tension whispering around every corner. Perhaps in 1900, there might have been some point in debunking that particular vision, but not in 2000 – unless one intended to replace it with a more realistic vision. And Polk doesn't do that.
He promises to do it. He proposes to show through his personal experience that there has always been a southern culture that exists outside the fictionalized rural South and small towns with with statues of Confederate soldiers. He says there has always been a Southern culture "trying its best to work its way up to an identifiable, certifiable middleclass way of life, that has always engaged its own history and its received history in its own way, on its own terms, terms not all that different from those of middleclass American towns everywhere.” Good idea, but in order to accomplish that goal, the writer would have to prove the "always" part, and he doesn't even attempt to do that. Had he taken the time necessary to identify the historical roots of the the group he discusses, he might have contributed insight to the study of Southern culture.
For he is right about the importance of the group he fumbles to identify. Long before cotton changed the southern economy, migrants were flooding into the three major parts of the South, the Upper South, the Mid-South, and the Deep South. Most came from the Carolinas, though many also came from Pennsylvania and Virginia via the Great Wagon Road. Like these regions, the Deep South, which is the only part Polk addresses, grew out of the farming and cattle culture that developed in the lowlands of South Carolina in the early 18th century. The English proprietors of South Carolina had lured English and European Protestants to the colony with the promise of land, farm implements, and enough horses, cattle, and swine to meet their work and food needs. These people, largely English and Scots-Irish, were needed to increase the rice production on which the colony’s economy rested. Their animals were let roam free in the swampy land adjacent to the rice fields, where the new green cane shoots provided a rich diet, supplemented by the tall grasses that grew in adjacent pine barrens, nuts and other vegetation. They multiplied rapidly with little attention from their owners, and soon the sale of beef to England’s West Indian colonies produced more revenue than the rice crops.
In time, these people gave up rice farming altogether in favor of the life of the cattle pens and moved south and east along the pine belt of the southern plains from South Carolina to Texas. The insatiatiable British desire for beef guaranteed a ready market. In addition to a log residence and garden path, each pen or ranch was a self-sufficient production unit that included the raising, slaughter, and marketing of hogs and cattle which were shipped to market along the many streams that flowed to the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. The herds ranged in size from several hundred to several thousand. In the Upper and Mid-South, the German practice of feeding lots affected the industry, but in the Deep South free-range ranching existed present from the outset, necessitating the registration of brands and the specialized help of herders, often African slaves brought from herding regions. These folk migrated into Georgia, then into Alabama and Mississippi as those territories were opened, Eventually many graziers supplemented ranching with work in the timber industry, setting up portable sawmills or working in the forests. The nature of cattle raising made possible other seasonal work. In time, many turned completely to work in the burgeoning timber industry that came with the construction of railroads, though almost all maintained herds of cattle and pork that also provided income and food for their tables.
So important to the South was ranching that in 1860, the revenues from beef exceeded those from cotton in the South.
In the 1850s, these people, still ranching but now working more and more in the timber industry, moved into the area around Picayune, MS, where Polk’s roots lay. Later, they split into two major migrations: one went north along the Mississippi and crossed the river into the piney hills and swamps of Catahoula Parish in Central Louisiana, where they continued to live much as their ancestors had lived in South Carolina. The other struck out across the prairies of South Louisiana and moved into the Big Woods of East Texas. These people traveled in groups connected by history, kinship, religious faith, and friendship. They set up new Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches with each move, and they often worked cooperatively. They generally were a confident, independent lot, having successfully relied on their own wits and hard work and the land for 150 years. Census records show most of them had little cash, even when they owned large amounts of land, and long after they had become the owners or clerks in small businesses or moved into professions, they clung tenaciously to those lands. They had learned that currency was often dicey, but that land always had value, both as a means of providing sustenance and as a steady investment. I would be surprised if many southerners Polk’s age had not sat on front porches listening to their elders discuss someone’s refusal to sell land and heard the final word on that topic: “They’re not making any more of it.”
A small number of these folk had owned owned slaves, but they had worked alongside their enslaved workers. Their relationships were different from those of the plantation owner with many enslaved workers ¬– more personal and human. Records show that after the Civil War, many of the newly freed African Americans moved along with the whites who had been their masters, many of them being given land by their former masters. Records also show that in the 1960s and 1970s, during the civil rights struggles and the integration of public facilities, communities comprised largely of these people had fewer problems than communities in the plantation regions.
Why Polk did not appreciate the positive role of these people in Southern culture is unclear. But he didn’t. His book is an embarrassingly private fulmination about the world they had created, about his extended family, and most particularly about his father, whose determination to rise economically through hard work as the owner of a tire and appliance store in the little town of Picyune the writer scorns. A veteran of WWII who seemed to have suffered bouts of PTSD, Polk’s father returned from the war and worked his way up in the town to ownership of his own business, in which his son worked on weekends and summers. Without a college education himself, he assured his son the opportunity for a professional degree. Yet even as the author describes a scene in which his father apologized for a verbal outburst, weeping and holding his son in his arms, he claims that his father was emotionally unavailable to him.
Most extraordinary of all, he writes an entire chapter titled “My Father Flem Snopes.” To conflate his father, whose honesty, religious faith, and fair-dealing Pope acknowleges, with the father of the oily Snopes tribe, who rose through cheating, lying, and willingness to seize any main chance, regardless of its ethical character, reveals a stunning lack of intellectual discrimination – not to mention a public disrespect for the father whose efforts made possible what Polk seems to regard as his own rise to eminence.
It also points to a more proper understanding of this book. The author is ashamed of what he regards his family’s lowly rural past and his parents’ move into what he scorns as an embarrassingly bourgeoise life. He contrasts his own boyhood as a “city mouse” (It’s Picayune, MS, mind you. Not even Jackson!) with the life of his country cousins. He scorns his father’s long hours of work, his membership in the Rotary Club, and his work as a deacon in his church. Without anything to suggest its truth, he even tries to imagine his father as part of the group who lynched a black man.
Unwittingly, Polk reveals his own participation in the so-called Southern myth. He deserved better than such humble roots. He, who wrote introductions to the books of William Faulkner, whose values he appears not fully to have understood and whose classifications he could not get past, deserved to have been born into a town like Oxford, MS----or rather, Faulkner’s fictionalization of Oxford, Jefferson. The only way he seemed able to envision his father and the rest of his family was in terms of those classifications and the values they implied. Thereby, he missed the value of the important part of Southern culture that had brought his own family to the “city” of Picyune, Mississippi. Polk lacked the critical bent to question Faulkner’s categories or completeness the Southern Myth he said he sought to dispel. He lacked the curiosity to search out the real history of his people and a sizable portion of the Southern population in the history section of the university library. And he lacked the breadth of vision to appreciate the virtues of the culture they and people like them created.
If he lives, as he claims, in a place undistinguised by history or regional traditions it is because he chose to deny its history and its traditions. He rejected his extended family because they were rural folk, beneath his idea of sophistication. He rejected his father because he sought to establish a solid middle-class life for his family. Indeed, the only person whom he treats positively is a high school bank director whose skills and work took the Polk and other members of the band out of Mississippi to New Orleans, Hollywood, and beyond.
Polk seemed not to understand either the culture of Picyune, MS, or the wider South. His ignorance of history denies him any solid perspective other than his strictly private experience. His pride in having risen above his past (He taught at a small state school, not 100 miles from his birthplace) is everywhere apparent in the book and everywhere annoying in its lack of sophistication.
This book in no way defines a culture that is “outside” the popular myth of the South. It is instead a Southern and meaner-spirited version of Holden Caulfield’s shallow mid-century rants. As that, it might prove interesting to the psychologist, but not to anyone who hopes to find the part of Southern culture that is outside the simplistic Southern Myth. And that part is well worth locating.
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
Engaging, Captivating, and Unique
By A Customer
Hardly the pity-fest that an earlier Amazon reviewer would have you take it for, Noel Polk's Outside the Southern Myth is a fascinating glimpse into a South that, although probably closer to the South that most Southerners live in, often goes ignored in literature, television, music, and film in favor of depictions of hard-drinkin' good ol' boys or genteel aristocrats. Sure, the South has plenty of both (though I haven't seen a white linen suit or a mint julep in a while), but Polk's book complicates the traditional view of Southern life and shows that a middle-class Southern experience can be just as rich, tragic, perplexing, and worthy of study as any Faulkner novel.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
I Enjoyed This Book
By Micheil O'Ceallaigh
In the way of full disclosure, I must admit that I knew the author. We grew up together in the same town, went through 12 years of school together (grades 1-12), we were Cub Scouts together (his mother was our den leader) and I knew his father (and the store he owned and operated). We were never close friends during our early years but I enjoyed reading this book - his memories of growing up in the town of Picayune and of his life after leaving Picayune. I didn't know anything of his life after we graduated high school. But, being from the town, I was able to relate closely with his memories of his early life there. My own life was similar to his in many ways growing up. While he played in the high school band, I played sports in high school. And he was a better student than I was. We were able to meet as adults once, 40 years after graduation - he turned out to be a different person than I recall from our early years.
My background and familiarity with him therefore give me a different perspective than other reviewers of this book. I got different things from this book than they did. I think the book title is a bit misleading. While he did spend time explaining how his life was different than the stereotypical Southerner, Noel's book felt more like a recounting of his life and how he came to be the adult person he was. Anyone hoping for a full and complete exposition on the "Southern Myth" is probably going to be disappointed.
Noel stayed in the South and his academic expertise in the writings of Faulkner, Welty and other Southern authors probably gave him a much greater awareness of his Southern-ness than I have of mine. I left the South after graduating college and am now much less awash in the culture of the region than when I was growing up. In reading this book, I got the sense that, although Noel was proud of his Southern roots and life, he did not want his life and career to be defined by or judged against what he felt others held to be the stereotype of a Southern intellectual. That's a difficult objective to achieve because, for good or bad, he was the product of the Southern culture and he could only guess at what he thought others' stereotypical image of a Southerner might be. I got the feeling that being a Southerner and an expert in Southern writers put Noel into a box more narrow than he felt comfortable in. His book felt much like an attempt to explain that he was much more than that. As someone who knew him in childhood (but was a stranger in adulthood), I agree that Noel was more than the sum of his Southern-ness. I hope other readers come away the same impression.
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