| In the 1949 classic Killers of the Dream, Lillian
Smith described three racial "ghosts" haunting the mind of the
white South: the black woman with whom the white man often had
sexual relations, the rejected child from a mixed-race coupling,
and the black mammy whom the white southern child first loves
but then must reject. In this groundbreaking work, Robert H.
Brinkmeyer, Jr., extends Smith's work by adding a fourth "ghost"
lurking in the psyche of the white South—the specter of European
Fascism. He explores how southern writers of the 1930s and 1940s
responded to Fascism, and most tellingly to the suggestion that
the racial politics of Nazi Germany had a special, problematic
relevance to the South and its segregated social system.
As Brinkmeyer shows, nearly all white southern writers in
these decades felt impelled to deal with this specter and
with the implications for southern identity of the issues
raised by Nazism and Fascism. Their responses varied widely,
ranging from repression and denial to the repulsion of self-recognition.
With penetrating insight, Brinkmeyer examines the work of
writers who contemplated the connection between the authoritarianism
and racial politics of Nazi Germany and southern culture.
He shows how white southern writers—both those writing cultural
criticism and those writing imaginative literature—turned
to Fascist Europe for images, analogies, and metaphors for
representing and understanding the conflict between traditional
and modern cultures that they were witnessing in Dixie.
Brinkmeyer considers the works of a wide range of authors
of varying political stripes: the Nashville Agrarians, W.
J. Cash, Lillian Smith, William Alexander Percy, Thomas Wolfe,
William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers,
Robert Penn Warren, and Lillian Hellman. He argues persuasively
that by engaging in their works the vital contemporary debates
about totalitarianism and democracy, these writers reconfigured
their understanding not only of the South but also of themselves
as southerners, and of the nature and significance of their
art.
The magnum opus of a distinguished scholar, The Fourth
Ghost offers a stunning reassessment of the cultural and
political orientation of southern literature by examining
a major and heretofore unexplored influence on its development.
Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., is professor
of English and southern studies at the University of South
Carolina. He is the author of Remapping Southern Literature:
Contemporary Southern Writers and the West, Katherine
Anne Porter's Artistic Development: Primitivism, Traditionalism,
and Totalitarianism, The Art and Vision of Flannery
O'Connor, and Three Catholic Writers of the Modern
South. |
