Sense of Place

CLEANTH BROOKS ONCE DESCRIBED Marion Montgomery as “one of the most acute and profound critics of present-day American culture.” This volume contains 26 essays in testimony to the truth of that statement.

On Matters Southern is timely, coming as it does on the 75th anniversary of the publication of I’ll Take My Stand. Like those Agrarian writers, Montgomery, a native of Georgia, advocates a regionalism rooted in time and place as opposed to the provincialism pandemic in modern man. Flannery O’Connor noted modernity’s radical instability in both time and place, observing: “You know what’s the matter with all that kind of folks? They ain’t from anywhere.” For modern man is a new nomad–one of speed, living everywhere and nowhere.

Being rooted in a place is a hallmark of civilization that enables the development of the person and family. Appreciation of place is not something peculiar or restricted to the American South; it is more of a cultural delineation than a geographic one. Yeats prayed his daughter would be “rooted in one dear perpetual place.” In this regard, Yeats is a kind of “Southerner.” Says Montgomery:

Let me offer an example. Only a male and a female joined together in marriage are naturally creative with the gift of procreating and fostering children. This makes all community possible. Chief Justice Margaret Marshall of the Massachusetts Supreme Court recently attacked this most basic component of civilization in proclaiming gay marriage. Ignoring natural law, and the experiences of history and civilization, Marshall said that the family is really an “evolving paradigm.” She fits Montgomery’s definition of a provincial without roots in time or place–unless it be the island of Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels, where residents seek to extract sunshine from cucumbers and build houses top first without any foundations.

Montgomery, a writer and poet, essays that the breakup of family is the primary factor in the great disorder of Western civilization: “For we are in an age which is at once decaying as Athens decayed before the frustrated eyes of Euripides.” Montgomery believes “we are giving birth to a new paganism such as the world has never before imagined.” He is concerned about the order of civilization because it leads us toward the cause of all order. He knows from his vast study of history and literature that man is a creature living in time, yet possessing an eternal destiny. He knows man is on a journey, though as “we travel from local to local [we] sometimes gain brief visions of the transcendent and the timeless–through the local.”

In these essays, Montgomery explores the breakup of our civilization and also how it impinges upon the art of the writer. “When a particular writer succumbs to the provincialism which is everywhere rampant in our ‘national spirit,'” he says, “he will cease to be regionalist and increasingly become a provincial writer with all the weaknesses that provincialism intrudes upon art.” Flannery O’Connor called this provincialism “secular Manichaean.” Eric Voegelin’s more encompassing term was “secular Gnosticism.” Both “superimpose distortions upon the reality of being that is the prime source of art’s life.”

As a Southern writer, Montgomery occupies an advantageous position because he still knows what a man or woman is. He knows human beings have an essential nature. The perspective allowed by place enables a clearer vision of the distortions and grotesques of reality so prevalent among us from those who are busy trying to recreate man’s nature and the nature of created reality. Montgomery believes in “the person, an intellectual soul incarnate, who by the gift of being is required to address history and nature, and the accidents of time and place, as steward to the inherent goodness of creation itself.”

The Southern writer approaches man and the nature of reality with “wonder, curiosity and piety.” He revels in the small particulars of the world. A person immerses himself in reality as a mysterious gift, and resists the temptation to abstract oneself from it as if it were a mechanical problem to be solved. This is in opposition to the travesty of art synthetically manufactured in academia, and those who write for commercial success. And by those who see “literature as a sector of our intellectual estate to be seized by the pseudo-sciences of sociology and psychology and turned to political and social ends.”

Montgomery states the problem clearly:

The Southern regionalism advocated by Marion Montgomery is a defense of Western civilization and its essentially Christian makeup. Provincialism is its opposite. Allen Tate thought of provincialism as “that state of mind in which regional men lose their origin in the past and its continuity into the present, and begin every day as if there had been no yesterday.”

Montgomery contrasts the Southern, or regional, writer with the provincial one, concentrating on three native-born Southern writers: William Faulkner, Truman Capote, and Flannery O’Connor. (Of the three, Capote is the provincial, the kind of writer suited for Hollywood.) Montgomery contrasts Capote’s output with the timeless work of O’Connor and Faulkner. Capote detached himself from his writing; O’Connor thought such detachment “reflects a sickness.” Montgomery further examines all three writers’ use of violence. Faulkner’s and O’Connor’s is a more human violence than that in a story by Capote where the violence lacks a “burden of responsibility.” Capote’s provincial world is a “dream world through which characters float in search of an awakening. The characters have a grotesqueness which defines them as separate from mankind, while Faulkner’s and O’Connor’s characters have their grotesqueness as a definition of their relationship.”

Provincial writing is all too common today, and is truly cold-blooded, lacking any moral sense or sensibility, and uninspired by any transcendent reality. It is a literature that, in America today, finds an all-too-receptive audience, and, sadly, the South is rapidly becoming like the rest of the nation. Flannery O’Connor stated in stark language our ongoing crisis: “The moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which is what I suppose Nietzsche meant when he said God is dead.”

Patrick J. Walsh is a writer in Massachusetts.