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The Southern Connection
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20323 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1992 |
2,269 Words |
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Walter Sullivan
Walter Sullivan, a novelist and literary critic, is professor
of English and director of the program in creative writing at
Vanderbilt University. His most recent novel is The War the
Women Lived: Voices From the Confederate South (1996). |
Tim Winton says that he was influenced by writers of the American South, William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Conner and Walker Percy, and no one who has read Cloudstreet is likely to doubt him. Modern southern novelists are some of the finest writers this country has produced; the best of them are among the greatest writers of our century, and the greatest of all is William Faulkner. He was a master technician who created an imaginary southern society that was recognizable as authentic not only to southerners but to serious readers throughout the world.
As a writer of fiction, Faulkner could do almost everything well: His characters were angular and complex; his plots, sometimes simple, sometimes complicated, were brilliantly conceived; his eye for detail, his ear for dialogue were all but flawless. He was comparable to James Joyce in his exploitation of point of view. He understood chronology almost as well as Joseph Conrad. He had all the tools, and though he was not in the conventional sense a religious man, he was a child of southern piety. Almost all of these literary virtues can be found in the work of Tim Winton.
No other southern writer was as talented as Faulkner, but even so, others were more talented than most of their contemporaries, and they did their jobs well. Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy all wrote with voices that are unique. I do not know which of Welty's stories or novels Winton most admires, but in general her fiction is informed by a mysterious inner vision that often leaves her readers believing that whatever they have brought away from a Welty story, more remains to be discovered.
For example, Phoenix Jackson, heroine of "A Worn Path," walks to town from her rural home on Christmas Eve to get medicine for her chronically sick grandson. Phoenix is very old, and the impediments she encounters along her way make her journey seem like a kind of allegory. There are streams to cross, briars that snatch at her clothing, dogs that snarl, and a ghostly scarecrow that shifts in a sinister wind. Readers of this story are tempted to try to find hidden meanings in the fact that it takes place on Christmas Eve; in the images of death that occur throughout it; in the ailing grandson who, Phoenix says, "will endure." But the effort is doomed. The pieces won't fit. The mystery remains a mystery, which is one of the reasons that the story is so good.
The sense of mystery is more overt in the work of Flannery O'Connor. Like Faulkner--and Winton, who would write years later on the other side of
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