New Stories from the South 2000

by Ellen Douglas

Susanne Langer, the twentieth-century philosopher who seems to me to have written most cogently on the subject of art, at the beginning of her great book Feeling and Form defined art as "the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling." Not mirrors to the world, not instruction, not entertainment, not even beauty, but the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling. Langer says that the human animal is preeminently a symbol-making creature. We make forms that help us to feel and understand the significance of the buzzing blooming dying chaos of our experience. A story, like a vase or a dance or a painting, is such an art form. It presents to the human mind and senses an "as if" world, a symbol, new with every writer, that makes the reader say, "Yes, that's how things are. I hadn't thought of it quite that way before, but that's how things are."

Flannery O'Connor wrote that "a story involves, in a dramatic way, the mystery of personality." "I lent some stories to a country lady who lives down the road from me," she wrote, "and when she returned them, she said, 'Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do.'"

And John Berger, the British critic, poet, and storyteller writes, "often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten." And, "art runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities cannot."

But don't the first and third of these writers disagree with each other? Isn't Berger saying with the words "judged the judges" that storytelling is didactic, moralistic, and isn't Langer saying that it is not? Why do I feel so strongly that they both speak the truth? Flannery O'Connor's neighbor, I think, answers me. Them stories just gone and shown me how some folks would do. The storyteller presents an imagined world, cruel or benevolent, joyous or tragic, but stripped of all irrelevancies and the reader responds with, Yes! That's how things are. The reader's life may indeed be changed, not because the writer has lectured him, but because of the power and truth of the story. If the reader judges the judges or pleads revenge to the innocent, it's because she has been moved by the story, the symbol.

We know of no people, no community of humans from as far back as we can go, who did not make stories. Stories with heroes and villains, stories with characters confronting fate, stories that transformed experience into symbols that gave meaning to human lives, that made the listeners, the readers weep or laugh aloud-- and indeed act, as perhaps no moralist might have made them act.

One of the mysteries of the human world is that there have always been communities of artists in every medium, periods when individuals in a particular corner of the world produced the flowering of a particular art. That's been true of storytellers in the South, and off and on we speculate--perhaps spend too much time speculating--about the whys and wherefores of that flowering.

A major role of the South in our history has been to be the anvil on which the nation's metal is beaten into its still evolving shape. Sometimes we've been leaders, sometimes villains, sometimes victims or scapegoats. Whether we're black or white, the fire has been turned up under our lives (and perhaps consequently under our stories) again and again. We have known honor and betrayal, slavery and freedom, brutal poverty and obscene wealth, religious fanaticism and racism, the intimacy and support of still-functioning communities and the loneliness of the outsider. And our artists have been among those who have wielded the hammer, shaped the metal of our destiny. They have striven to make sense of what life's brutalities cannot, have voiced our region's tragedies and dilemmas, have forced the nation to turn and look at these and to see that they are not simply the South's tragedies and dilemmas, but the nation's and indeed the world's.

All of our artists have had a share in this shaping, but particularly music makers and writers.

One sees immediately that blues and jazz and rock, and even rap and hip-hop, clearly run like rumors and legends and make sense of what life's brutalities cannot make sense of. But our stories function in this way, too. One thinks immediately of Faulkner's "Dry September," and Welty's "Where Is the Voice Coming From." And then a spate of titles and writers comes to mind--from Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable to Richard Wright and Zora Neal Hurston to Peter Taylor and Ernest Gaines and Richard Bausch and Anne Tyler.

At this point I seem to hear the voice of another writer who generalizes, as did the three I have quoted, and who, like them, speaks especially to the South. The Irish writer Frank O'Connor, who is one of my favorite storytellers, wrote in THE LONLEY VOICE, "always in the short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society." And, "there is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often ?nd in the novel--an intense awareness of human loneliness." He goes on to trace the essential loneliness of the short story character from Gogol through Chekhov to Joyce and Katherine Anne Porter.

Story after story in this year's New Stories From The South illustrates the writer's abiding concern with making an artwork expressive of human feeling, stripped of the extraneous, the irrelevant. Again and again a story runs like a rumor and a legend, making sense of what life's brutalities cannot. And I ?nd in these writers a deep and sympathetic perception of the tragedy of human loneliness.

Finally, as Flannery O'Connor's neighbor said, "Them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do."

Use of this excerpt from New Stories From The South: The Year's Best, 2000 may be made only for purposes of promoting the book, with no changes, editing, or additions whatsoever, and must be accompanied by the following copyright notice:

Copyright (c) 2000 by Ellen Douglas. All rights reserved.