Ferris, William. The
Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2013. $ 35.00
ISBN 978-1-4696-0754-2
Fred Hobson suggested in Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (1983) that
Southerners have, or may be possessed by, a compulsion to explain, to apologize
for, to defend, or to celebrate the history of a region which non-Southerners
"have long been fascinated with…as spectacle, as land of extremes in the
most innocent part of America in one respect and the guiltiest in
another…."(9). Hobson's speculation
cuts both ways. While many Southerners
do have a gift for drawling in ways that fascinate, a significant number of
them can be as taciturn as stereotyped New Englanders. Hobson's hyperbole confirmed the very oddity
he intended to place in an objective perspective regarding habits. He exercised due diligence in borrowing his main
title from William Faulkner's Absalom,
Absalom! as he explored selected works by people who were neither novelists
nor scholars. He also used predictable
Southern diligence in excluding black writers
(notably Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison) on the grounds that "it
would be impossible to do them justice" (13) in the scope of his study. Thus, Hobson self-fashioned himself as a
quintessential Southern apologist.
Thirty-three years later, it is instructive to contrast Tell About the South with William
Ferris's The Storied South: Voices of
Writers and Artists, which incorporates self-fashioning with minimal
apology Ferris acknowledges that Hobson
and many other of his University of North Carolina colleagues gave him
encouragement in every step of writing this book, a worthy companion to his
earlier Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices
of the Mississippi Blues
(2009). One might argue that Hobson's
work was a prelude to Ferris's explaining increasingly complex functions of
narrative in the South. Less an overt
apologist than Hobson, Ferris tells us about his own "intellectual and artistic
growth through friendships with" seven writers, five scholars, two
musicians, three photographers, and nine painters. Ferris relies primarily on
interviews to create a species of oral history. The absence of question and
answer markers, however, foregrounds shared
authority in the making of historical explanation. By exercising his autobiographical voice in
prefaces for the stories the writers and artists tell, Ferris demonstrates that
subjective artistry can enliven scholarship which focuses on difference in a
region of the United States.
To be sure, his
method of presentation enables selected voices to expose or to demythologize problems of credibility that arise in
contemporary studies of geographical
regions. By virtue of its
celebratory, non-defensive aura , The
Storied South alerts readers to aspects
of a story always untold in interdisciplinary investigations of Southern
cultures. In that sense, the book has an inevitable relationship to a
provocative series of manifestos about the future of Southern Studies in PMLA 131.1 (2016). That relationship is defined, in part, by
Ferris's rationale and folkloric methodological choices, items crucial for
understanding the rewards of Southern storytelling. This book is a remarkable self-portrait of
Ferris as a white, male scholar who is a native son of Mississippi, a former
chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joel R.
Williamson Eminent Professor of History and senior associate director of the
Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North
Carolina-Chapel Hill. It is
simultaneously a documentation of how twentieth-century Southern writers,
musicians, photographers, scholars, and painters "created a body of work
that defined both their regions and their nation"(2). Ferris's manipulation of interviews exposes
how oral traditions give compelling forms to "the contested memory of
black and white southerners who offer opposing views of the region's
history" (3).
The adequacy of this kind of binary narration (spinning
of tales) and history-making is itself
contestable and open to passionate, rigorous scrutiny by a new generation of
scholars who embrace motives and values quite unlike those espoused by Hobson
and Ferris. Younger scholars may
believe, as does Jay Watson, that "we need the combined conceptual
resources of southern and environmental studies to unpack the thick layers of
meaning that accrue when southerners write ecologically and environmental
thinkers write about the South" (PMLA
131.1: 159). Just as Ferris refines
Hobson's penchant for the rage to tell, recent developments in southern studies
help us to identify the charming limitations of Ferris's traditional approach
to the implications of story without diminishing the considerable value of how
Ferris seeks to recuperate time past and to display it to its best
advantage. His intervention is a
Faulknerian reminder that some Southern imperatives defy being wished into
oblivion. They haunt the South and our entire nation; if they cannot be resolved,
they can be addressed in ways that serve the commonweal. Indeed, the rage of younger scholars to
theorize the multiple facets of the South, to tell a new story, only amplifies
the humanistic civility of Ferris's work.
As an esteemed scholar of all things Southern, Ferris is
keenly aware that the spatial and temporal dimensions of a Southern story must
assume combative configurations in the Zeitgeist
of now. Our history-laden ideas
about Old South and New South cultures are being rapidly relocated
in scholarship by new fields of interpretation which draw attention to the
dramatic clashes of remembering and
forgetting the centrality of story.
Meaning and significance are recast in discussions of the global South;
the deep, down, and dirty South; the South as a racially and ecologically
challenged locus of cognition and imagination.
The voices of the South retrofit themselves in concert with revisionist
historiographies, emerging digital humanities and revitalized empiricism Thus, Ferris wisely includes a generous and
timely selected bibliography, discography, and filmography in The Storied South and appends CD
(interview sound recordings) and DVD (archival films) companion discs as
special resources or paratextual supplements.
From the vantage of a
probable future, The Storied South is
an excellent, authoritative record of how William Ferris at once mediates
and meditates on Southern
exceptionalism. It is a valuable
foundational text for American and international scholars who are existentially
obligated to tell explanatory stories which supersede regional
boundedness. If their stories prove to
be as principled and good as the one Ferris tells, we shall indeed be fortunate
and better prepared to avoid delusions that disguise themselves as contributions
to knowledge.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
