Tag Archives: lost cause

Lost Cause in the news

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Check out Brent Staples’s piece on the long aftermath of Lost Cause ideology, the idea that all Americans can get behind the noble intent and courage of Southerners who waged civil war even if the slavery system they defended was an abomination.

As a native of Jackson, MS and a child of very right-wing parents and extended family, I’m all-too-familiar with the revisionist ideas that were still dominant among Southern whites in my childhood in the 70s and 80s and have emerged with horrific force in the past ten years or so, predominantly under the sign of Trumpism but in no way limited to Trump’s personal appeal or whatever passes for his policy agenda. Just as I grew up with the idea that the Civil War was the “War Between the States” or even “The War of Northern Aggression” (the latter usually delivered with tongue in cheek a bit, but hardly disavowed); that the War was “not over slavery” but was about tariff policy (!) the abstractions of federalism (!!) or even more outlandish pseudo-causes; the attempts to enforce, at the state level, watered-down courses on “Mississippi history” that white-washed the bloody history of the state, so much so that the pretty corny and white-centered film Mississippi Burning shocked so many of us into reading up on SNCC, the Summer of 2963, and the killings of Schwerner, Cheney, and Goodman. And to ask our parents … uhh … what they were up to at that particular moment. Their answers were instructive. They were comfortably enmeshed in a Jim Crow fantasy world enabled by the fracturing, isolating force of residential segregation, segregated school (de jure) and workplaces (de facto), and assured the segregation represented the Best of All Possible Worlds.

I’ll pause the confessional mode now: confessions have a way of generating value that slips into the pocket of the teller, and I don’t mean to let myself, my old friends and family, or anyone else off the hook. More important is to read Staples, which narrates the peak of Lost Cause ideology in the 1910s (symptomatically the year of the “frame story” of Absalom and of Quentin’s suicide) and a sense of the stakes as we undergo furious battles on the local/state/federal levels, especially in libraries and classrooms, as we wage war over what we might have thought were settled liberal-democratic principles of teaching the work of the best, most informed and imaginative historians (and critics and sociologists and philosophers…) and allowing the widest possible access to the widest possible range of materials.

While I’m shilling for great work of others, Jamelle Bouie of the NYT is a freedom-fighter who has somehow figured out how to let the rather stodgy and latte-liberal NYT let him drop so much knowledge on the legal and civil rights history of the US, grounded in Du Bois’s later work, especially Black Reconstruction in the US, which is itself a must-read to hear the echoes of the “nadir” phase of the history of civil rights for African Americans in our own moment.

I’ll also mention the brand-new book of my dear friend Jeff Sharlet, a journalist and professor at Dartmouth whose The Undertow: Scenes from a Civil War weaves together a wide range of pieces that tell the “inner story” of our moment, the kind of stuff that the who/what/where/when mode of normal journalism often leaves out. He’s a white dude like myself (don’t know whether you’ve noticed), but he leverages that “unmarked” aspect to attend Trump marches, talk to militia members, slip into megachurches, and, in a spy/counterspy mode pioneered by the great James Agee and Walker Evans, reads the symptoms of what he experiences richly and broadly, in analyses firmly grounded in a leftist reading of culture, history, and economics but open to the affective tug of aspects of right-wing culture (guns, the Prosperity Gospel, border politics, Trump’s “charisma,” etc.) in ways that allow us to understand it more deeply and hence, perhaps, how to combat its violence and forge differently affect-rich cultural forms that speak to parts of the body beneath the frontal cortex. Here’s an interview as well, from the Guardian.

Finally, if you don’t know already, as CUNY folk you can get free digital access to the NYT (including via iOS or Android app) via the Library. So do it and avoid having your news quite as algorithmically tailored as it is on most social media platforms.

Shreve and the ghosts of the Deep South

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“I want to understand it if I can and I don’t know how to say it better. Because it’s something my people haven’t got. Or if we have got it, it all happened long ago across the water and so now there aint anything to look at every day to remind us of it. We don’t live among defeated grandfathers and freed slaves (or have I got it backward and was it your folks that are free and the niggers that lost?) and bullets in the dining room table and such, to be always reminding us to never forget. What is it? something you live and breathe in like air? A kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory at and in happenings that occurred and ceased fifty years ago? A kind of entailed birthright father and son and father and son of never forgiving General Sherman, so that forever more as long as your children’s children produce children you wont be anything but a descendant of a long line of colonels killed in Pickett’s charge at Manassas? (AA 289)”

“’The South,’ Shreve said, “The South, Jesus. No wonder you folks all outlive yourselves by years and years and years. I was becoming quite distinct; he would be able to decipher the words soon, in a moment; even almost now, now, now.
‘I am older at twenty than a lot of people who have died’ Quentin said. (AA 301)”

Shreve’s point-of-view as an outsider is key in Faulkner’s narration of this critical compilation of southern history. These two excerpts from Absalom, Absalom! seem to embody Shreve’s character’s understanding of the South through Quentin Compson. The final chapters of the novel allow the reader to wade through the epic Sutpin and Compson history while Quentin and Shreve discuss, theorize and piece together the puzzling information Quentin has received from his father, Rosa Coldfield and from his own experiences as a citizen of Jefferson and participant in its collective consciousness. Shreve’s questioning and skeptical nature reflects his inability to comprehend the way people behave in response to their pasts in the American South. He refers to the “way folks all outlive [themselves] for years and years” in recognition of the way people are memorialized and cemented into the legacy of their family and community. Faulkner reveals in this novel of storytelling and heritage how there is no real end for the stories of the people who live in the South and live on in the treasured memory of their families and in the location itself. People are constantly referred to as “shades”, “demons” and “ghosts” in the novel and it is obvious how they inherit the same immortality. Shreve has met Quentin at college and the culture shock that he experiences from his connection to the Southern gentleman allows the reader to maintain an outsider’s skeptical perspective through his narrations.

Shreve hails from Alberta but the narrator describes how he and Quentin are “connected” by the “Continental Trough, that River which runs not only through the physical land of which it is the geologic umbilical, not only runs through the spiritual lives of the beings within its scope” (AA 208). Their connection to each other is described as being a result of a connection with their homelands strengthening the Faulknerian concept of a physical environment and its history playing a major role in the character of a person. The landscape is influencing these characters on a “spiritual” level just as it influences the many Southern characters of Faulkner’s novels that are fated by their very environments. The beginning of the novel introduces Quentin as, “still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost but nevertheless having to be one for all that, since he was born and bred in the deep South”(AA 4). He has inherited the history and is unable to escape becoming a part of the ever flowing cultural consciousness. The haunted state of the South is mentioned while Quentin prepares to listen to Rosa Coldfield’s history. He feels split between denial of his own identity as a southern ghost and the accepting of being “in the South, the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts, listening, having to listen, to one of the ghosts which had refused to lie still even longer than most had, telling him about old ghost-times” (AA 4). Quentin understands the effect being a Southerner has on people during this time haunted by the “lost cause” of the Civil War. In this moment the reader can see the tension that this awareness causes in Quentin, a split identity between the haunted Southerner and the Southerner trying to evade his country’s past.

This creation of ghosts in the South is also explained by Jason Compson when he justifies the town’s allowance of Rosa Coldfield’s strange behavior. Mr. Compson explains how the southern gentleman made their “women into ladies. Then the War came and made the ladies into ghosts” (AA 7). Therefore, in his explanation, it is only proper for “being gentleman” to “but listen to them being ghosts” (AA 7). War is responsible for the creation of living ghosts who once lived the lives of aristocratic ladies but now are only left haunting their own lives, now seemingly over since the war, and retelling the ghost stories of themselves and their country. Quentin absorbs this story and Shreve is left to interpret the epic tragedy of Tom Sutpin from this ghost of the deep South passing on the tale too as it has already been passed through generations.

The ghostliness of AA reflects the way the South is like a “vacuum” where history is never history and the past is never dead. The forum of Quentin and Shreve’s storytelling actual history and what may or probably happened forces Quentin to recognize his culture and the ghosts that haunt his culture’s consciousness. “I am listening to it all over again I shall have to never listen to anything else but this again forever so apparently not only a man never outlives his father but not even his friends and acquaintances do” (AA 222). Quentin’s thoughts on having to listen to and repeat the Sutpin tale over and over again reflects the haunting imprint the past has on the southern consciousness. The repetition of the story keeps it alive and breathing in the minds of the story tellers and the audience.

The haunted South is embodied in Quentin Compson and his relationship with the outsider Shreve allows for the reader to see the nature of this haunted place more clearly. Faulkner’s use of Shreve solidifies the skeptical perspective he maintains in his epic tale of the South. The storytelling frame of Quentin and Shreve reinforce the trope of ghosts of the past haunting the present through the telling of their ghost stories; they are the Southern legacy which has been passed down since the shock of the failure of the Civil War.