The Ferocity of Self

According to orthodox interpretation, the poets and novelists of the twentieth-century South have found their inspiriting motive in a sense of tangible attachment to a world immediately descended from an antebellum community focused in the family. Against my own inclination to cherish this notion, I am going to make the contrary suggestion that the essential motive of southern writers has been their recognition-willing and unwilling, conscious and unconscious-of their relationship to an Old South that in its inmost nature was centered less in the family than in the self. I shall employ three model figures of southern literary history in my argument: Thomas Jefferson, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. Although selective and fragmentary, my remarks indicate a revision of our attitude toward the literary treatment of the Old South as the emblem of a society of manners and customs. But, I should stress, I am not talking about the South as a symbol in the popular literary imagination; I am discussing the South as a subtle symbol-a metaphorical essence-in the imagination of the gifted literary mind. I must at once confront the formidable figure of Allen Tate, who in A Southern Mode of the Imagination declares unqualifiedly that whether residing on the plantation or the farm-whether represented by the Lees of Virginia or the Tates of Tate's Creek Pike in Kentucky-the family was the center of Old South culture. Yet if I may anticipate my argument, Tate proves to be more friendly than inimical to it. Defining the family as the heart of a society of manners and custom, the center of an integral or organic society, he makes an arresting connection in A Southern Mode of the Imagination between the Old South society of family, the southern society of his own time, and the twentieth-century southern literary imagination. Unlike the dialectical mode of imagination

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