Apocalypse South: Judgment, Cataclysm, and Resistance in the Regional Imaginary

234 Pages·2017·1.15 MB·English

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LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School
2008
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Anthony Hoefer
Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College
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Hoefer, Anthony, "Apocalypse South: Judgment, Cataclysm, and Resistance in the Regional Imaginary"
(2008). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 2071.
https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/2071
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APOCALYPSE SOUTH: JUDGMENT, CATACLYSM,
AND RESISTANCE IN THE REGIONAL IMAGINARY

A Dissertation
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the
Louisiana State University and
Agricultural and Mechanical College
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in
The Department of English

by
Anthony Hoefer
B.A., Wofford College, 2000
M.A., University of Alabama, 2003
May 2008
© Copyright 2008
Anthony D. Hoefer, Jr.
All rights reserved.
i i
in memory of
John Cleveland Cobb
(1953-2004)
Associate Professor of English, Wofford College
guitar and vocals, The 88s

and

for Kate

***

“It is an ethical obligation to look for hope;
it is an ethical obligation not to despair.”
-Tony Kushner

***

Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.
Romans 12:21

ii i
Acknowledgments
While this dissertation is attributed to a single author, it reflects the contributions
of dozens of others—friends, family members, colleagues, and teachers who have offered
their insight, inspiration, support, and timely distractions. In particular, I owe many
thanks to my good friend Mason Brown: in the spring of 2004, Mason sent me a mix CD
full of God-fearing blues, country, gospel, and traditional folk songs. That disc was
entitled Apocalypse Southern. And so it all began.
Mason’s contribution might be the most obvious, but so many others have helped
in equally important ways. I’ll begin with my family: thanks to Mom, Dad, Paul, and
Emily for the continued support/indulgence of their eldest son and brother. I also want to
thank John, Len, and Will Carpenter and Claire & Jim Avant for welcoming me into their
family.
I can’t imagine anyone pursuing academic life without the inspiration of other
teachers, and I’m proud to be following the path laid by my mother and my mother-in-
law, two great teachers. In addition to them, I’ve been mentored by some of the best:
Chuck McCord and Diane McKenzie at Wilson Hall; Bernie & Anne Dunlap and Larry
McGehee at Wofford College, who together convinced me to pursue an academic life; the
faculty of the Governor’s School of South Carolina at the College of Charleston, who
confirmed that decision; and Jim Salem, Rich Megraw, and Stacey Morgan at the
University of Alabama, who helped me begin my career. The entire English Department
at LSU has provided a nurturing and challenging environment, and that has much to do
with the leadership of its chair, Anna Nardo, who also happens to be a great teacher.
Many thanks to the members of my committee: I have greatly benefited from my
iv
associations with Brannon Costello, Jerry Kennedy, Katherine Henninger, and Rick
Moreland. In particular, I’d like to thank Rick, who served as the department’s Director
of Undergraduate Study during my time at LSU: his willingness to share his time and his
experience with other teachers seems boundless. And of course, I’d be hard pressed to
find a more supportive dissertation director than John Lowe: thanks for pushing me when
I needed pushing, offering praise when it was required, and consistently providing a
model for how to do this job.
I also want to thank two incredible colleagues (and fellow South Carolinians!),
Courtney George and Scott Whiddon: your advice and insights have been instrumental,
and your support is greatly appreciated. I hope I’ve been able to return the favor. Many
thanks also to the friends who’ve provided additional moral support and crucial
distractions during this process: Keith Moody, Scott Gage, Melissa & Joe Baustian, and
Jessica & Duncan Kemp.
Finally and most importantly, thanks to Kate: you came into my life early in this
process, and so you’ve had to live with it every bit as much as I have. I appreciate your
willingness to listen to ideas and the time you spent reviewing my work. However, your
real contribution goes far beyond the project: you made the dissertation better by making
my life better. Your presence allowed me to put the dissertation in its appropriate place;
thanks to you, I’ve been able to step away from the work to simply enjoy our lives, and
then, to come back to the table with fresh ideas and renewed confidence. What follows in
these pages is not my achievement, but ours. I can’t wait to see what we come up with
next!

v
Table of Contents

DEDICATION………………………………………………………………………iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………..….iv

ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………vii

INTRODUCTION: TRACING THE APOCALYPTIC IMAGINARY……………..1

CHAPTER 1: “ON THE BRINK OF THE CATARACT”:
COMMUNITY AND THE APOCALYPTIC RITUAL OF
LYNCHING IN FAULKNER’S LIGHT IN AUGUST……………………..25

CHAPTER 2: “TEARING DOWN THE TEMPLE”:
RICHARD WRIGHT’S MILLENNIAL RESISTANCE..………………….77

CHAPTER 3: “AN’T THE MEASURE MADE YET?”:
MAPPING APOCALYPSE ALONG THE MARGINS OF SOUTHERN
COMMUNITIES IN BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA...………………….115

CHAPTER 4: “SOME SAY AIN’T NO EARTHLY EXPLANATION”:
EXCAVATING THE APOCALYPTIC LANDSCAPE OF
RANDALL KENAN’S TIMS CREEK……………………………………147

EPILOGUE: APOCALYPSE SOUTH, REDUX:
SEARCHING FOR MEANING AFTER THE FLOOD..………………....187

BIBLIOGRAPHY.…………………………………………………………………215

VITA……………………………………………………………………………….226

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Abstract

This project investigates manifestations of Apocalypse in selected works of
southern fiction, each of which simultaneously draws upon the cosmology of southern
evangelical Protestantism and disrupts that cosmology’s power to govern the discourses
of race, class, and gender in the U.S. South. Apocalypse South proposes that invocations
of the Apocalypse are signs of deferred meaning—of hidden histories of
undifferentiation, hybridity, and contradiction which defy the prevailing discourses that
configure social relationships in southern spaces and places. Southern religious culture
maps Apocalypse onto the boundaries of race, class, and gender and imparts catastrophic
consequences to their violations. However, the works investigated by this project
appropriate these apocalyptic spaces in order to articulate histories neglected and even
concealed by the prevailing discourses of southern community. I contend that these
works engage a recognizable regional apocalyptic imaginary: they conjure a landscape
fraught with the apocalyptic possibilities of cataclysm, judgment, deliverance, revolution,
and, above all else, a hope that things will get better. Apocalypse South charts this
“unseen world of archangels and prophets and folk rising from the dead” (to borrow
Randall Kenan’s words) through readings of William Faulkner’s Light in August, Richard
Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children, Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, Kenan’s A
Visitation of Spirits and “Let the Dead Bury Their Dead,” and the apocalypticism evident
in representations of the 2005 flooding of New Orleans

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Introduction: Tracing the Apocalyptic Imaginary

Fear the hearts of men are failing
These our latter days we know
The great depression now is spreading
God’s word declared it would be so

I’m going where there’s no depression
To a better land that’s free from care
I’ll leave this world of toil and trouble
My home’s in heaven
I’m going there

In this dark hour, midnight nearing
The tribulation time will come
The storms will hurl the midnight fear
And sweep lost millions to their doom

I’m going where there’s no depression
To a better land that’s free from care
I’ll leave this world of toil and trouble
My home’s in heaven
I’m going there

I’m going where there’s no depression
To a better land that’s free from care
I’ll leave this world of toil and trouble
My home’s in heaven
I’m going there

-The Carter Family, “There’s No Depression in Heaven”

The Carter Family recorded the song “There’s No Depression in Heaven” in
1936, the same year that Dorothea Lange photographed “Migrant Mother” and James
Agee and Walker Evans first began the project that would become Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men. The song—a selection from a popular shaped-note songbook rather than an
original composition—remains among their most notable and frequently covered.1 The

1 The song holds a seminal position within the pop genre variously referred to as alternative-
country/Americana/roots music: the alternative-country group Uncle Tupelo recorded it for their 1990
1
Carters were not a gospel act, and their professional aims did not include an evangelistic
mission (Malone 93). Nonetheless, the song is indicative of an effort to employ the
cosmology of evangelical and Fundamentalist Protestantism in order to make some sense
of an experience that is all but incomprehensible in its scope and complexity. Facing
instability wrought by drought, foreclosure, plummeting tobacco and cotton prices,2 and
the early stages of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South,3 the
Carters’ audience tuned their transistor radios to 650 kHz and sought solace in a signal
broadcasting from Nashville’s WSM to homes across the South (and indeed, across the
continent at night). By casting the contemporary crisis in the familiar words of Scripture,
Carter songs like “There’s No Depression in Heaven,” “The World is Not My Home,”
and “Can the Circle Be Unbroken” reconfigured chaos as the realization of prophesy
(“The great depression now is spreading/ God’s word declared it would be so”). Such
songs endow even the most awful consequences of this catastrophe with meaning, and
they situate the current moment of suffering as the fulcrum upon which the future
depends: the darkest moment—“midnight”—is upon us, and the coming storms of the
Tribulation will “sweep lost millions to their doom.” The suffering of this moment,
however, will be redeemed because it is a necessary step in the progression toward
ultimate deliverance—a point in the journey toward “a better land that’s free from care.”

album, No Depression, and that truncated title was appropriated for the bimonthly magazine devoted to the
genre.
2 The 1920s and ‘30s were a time of rapid economic expansion in southern cities, as well as growth in the
textile, mining, and steel industries. However, as Roger Biles notes, the bulk of the South’s population
could be found in rural areas and did not experience this prosperity; rather, for “southern farmers . . . the
Great Depression immediately meant more misery and deprivation” following the collapse of cotton prices
in 1920-21, the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, and the drought of 1930-31 (18). According to Biles,
“From 1929 to 1932, the value of cotton sales dropped from $1.5 billion to $45 million, and income from
the cigarette tobacco crop declined by two-thirds.”
3 For instance, fully 14 percent of Mississippi’s population of black men between 15 and 34 years old left
the state during the 1920s (Godden 11).
2