A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature by Richard Gray

In A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature Richard Gray investigates the Bahktinian dialogue present within the tradition of Southern literature. His first chapter traces the voices of disaster through Southern literature, but instead of beginning and ending with the trauma of the Civil War, Gray includes many different types of voices rehearsing defeat including Native Americans and African Americans and ends his chapter with Southern writers dealing with the Vietnam War. Gray’s second chapter looks at the dialogue of agrarianism: the pastoral voices of Jefferson and the Agrarians, the anti-pastoral responses that query the agrarian dream, and finally “a contemporary and radical rewriting of agrarianism that offers one of the few plausible remaining alternatives to global capitalism” (x). Gray concludes his book by looking at the Southern tradition in its larger context: a transnational dialogue that occurs at the borders and that helps to move the south beyond the popularly conceived “bipolar biracial model of the region and so of the regional dialogue” (xi).

I found this book very helpful. Its methodological approach contests Harold Bloom’s theories presented in The Anxiety of Influence by using a Bahktinian model of dialogue in the strain of T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” rather than a Freudian model of influence. This model of dialogue, I think, is a particularly helpful way of dealing with Faulkner in concert with other Southern writers. It also allows critical discussion of the Southern experience to move beyond the trauma of the Civil War (although not beyond trauma entirely) to consider more recent events (like the Vietnam War) and to deconstruct the monolithic Southern past into something more fragmented and fluid.

Gray uses a wide range of examples in his text, never neglecting Faulkner and other famous writers, but including modern authors and concerns as well. He does a better job fitting new voices into the dialogue than he does finding older, ignored voices to include. For example, in the first chapter, Gray acknowledges the dispossession of Native Americans and their experience of defeat long before the Civil War, but the focus of his chapter is incorporating two Vietnam War narratives into the dialogue of loss.

Ultimately, this book does a good job of investigating borders and old formations in order to participate in the documentation of the global south. Gray starts by taking two Southern clichés, the experience of defeat and the agrarian dream, and showing in a detailed history how current authors join an old, tired dialogue and reinvigorate it with contributions valid beyond the borders of the South. These contributions become even more valuable in the third chapter, when Gray demonstrates that not only is the Southern dialogue an integral and organic part of a larger dialogue, but also that the incursion of the larger dialogue in the Southern context helps enable writers to talk back to their predecessors more meaningfully and hopefully than before.