Imaginary Geography

I grew up below the Mason Dixon line in Frederick, MD. Maryland is located in a tricky place geographically. But I don't think I would be on too shaky ground if I were to say I grew up in the South. Summers did get hot there sometimes, I recall, and our state song proudly--disturbingly--proclaims "Maryland! / She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb- / Huzza! she spurns the Northern scum!" [1] and was a hit in certain Confederate circles back in the early 1860's.

Yet here in Alabama my accent betrays me: here I'm a yankee. No getting around it.

But all this brings up the question: where does the South begin? Or, to put it in negative terms, where does yankee territory begin?

I found something helpful in a book by Slavoj Žižek, where he wonders the same thing about the Balkans:

It seems as if there is no definitive answer to the question 'Where do the Balkans begin?' -- the Balkans are always somewhere else, a little bit more towards the southeast... Is not this identification of continental Europe itself with the Balkans, its barbarian Other, the secret truth of the entire movement of the displaced delimitation between the two? This enigmatic multiple displacement of the frontier clearly demonstrates that in the case of the Balkans we are dealing not with real geography but with an imaginary cartography which projects on to the real landscape its own shadowy, often disavowed, ideological antagonisms, just as Freud claimed that the localization of the hysteric's conversion symptoms project on to the physical body the map of another, imaginary anatomy.[2]

Similarly the Yankee is always from somewhere else, a little bit more north. I smiled when I read in To Kill a Mockingbird how a pair of sisters from northern Alabama were considered yankees.

Misses Tutti and Frutti Barber were maiden ladies, sisters, who lived together in the only Maycomb residence boasting a cellar. The Barber ladies were rumored to be Republicans, having migrated from Clanton, Alabama, in 1911. Their ways were strange to us, and why they wanted a cellar nobody knew, but they wanted one, and they dug one, and they spent the rest of their lives chasing generations of children out of it.

Misses Tutti and Frutti (their names were Sarah and Frances), aside from their Yankee ways, were both deaf.[3]

What all this means is that to really explore the South it is not enough to journey through the physical landscape, one must also travel about the imaginary landscape. The cotton fields and bayous, the gulf coast and red dirt roads are necessary, but not sufficient. Ideas and Art, Dreams and Nightmare must also be on our itinerary. Luckily, just as in the South there is no shortage of compelling scenery, I think, the imaginary geography is equally compelling.

[1] Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryland,_My_Maryland
[2] Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird.
[3] Žižek, Slavoj. The Fragile Absolute.

i have come to Alabama: a fur piece

"Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks 'I have come from Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-walking. A fur piece.' Thinking although I have not been quite a month on the road I am already in Mississippi, further from home than I have ever been before. I am now further from Doane's Mill than I have been since I was twelve years old"

from Light in August by William Faulkner[1]

I tried to read Light in August at least twice, and Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel at least twice. I'm halfway through Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard To Find and have been for a long time (I have to read O'Connor slowly savoring each story--recovering from each story--one at a time).

I've started two blogs previously, and now I'm starting a new one; this is my third blog and I probably should explain myself. If laziness and self-consciousness ended two web logs, what's the point in starting this new one? But moving to a new region seems like a good raison d'être for a blog. And moving to the South is a good excuse to read and re-read, find and finally finish, all those great classics of Southern American Fiction that I have hanging around on my shelves, so I thought I'd start this blog about moving to the South, living in the South, and reading the South.

Of course, ideas only arrive when they arrive, so I'll write about other things too. For instance, I occasionally have thoughts about Russian literature and history, particularly on cool crisp mornings like this one when I feel like once again rereading Anna Karenina, and for better or for worse and I suppose I'll have to post them here. Hopefully I'll keep posting here because it would be sad if this blog ended not with a bang, but with a whimper, like my first two blogs.

We'll see.


[1] Faulkner, William. Light in August. The Modern Library, New York, New York.