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Words and Places
| Article
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20642 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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10 / 1992 |
2,357 Words |
| Author
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Larry Woiwode
Larry Woiwode is the author of several novels, including the
recent Indian Affairs, and has a collection of essays The
Wheel at the Cistern, forthcoming. He lives in North Dakota. |
In Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, Johnson is quoted as saying that novelty is synonymous with ignorance. To appreciate what Johnson meant, you must realize he was an Augustan classicist and eighteenth-century Christian who believed there is nothing new under the sun. But he was implying more with his statement. He meant that whenever we pursue anything new in literature, believing that it is novel, we are displaying our ignorance: What we might believe is novel is actually commonplace, if we only knew the relevant Italian or Irish text to refer to. To see it from the other side, the person straining to achieve novelty in writing has ignored tradition--those centuries of recorded experience available to anybody willing to visit a well-stocked library. For as long as those libraries exist, that is.
If the center of a writer's interest is the verities of human existence, for that writer there is no novelty. Novelty is different from originality of vision or conception however. Originality of this sort suggests an edge that permits a reader to traverse familiar ground as if for the first time. This is the quality we're alert to in a new writer. Some writers achieve this edge by examining people or situations in terms of a new place. Once the concept of place is mentioned, the potential for regionalism begins to rise in the background, and it is not novel of me to say that regionalism has been examined from the time of the pastoral poets to the American Agrarians, and beyond. Nor is it a novelty to note that for many critics regionalism, if not ethnic boosterism, so that the term "regionalist" has come to denote an inferior writer.
Isn't 'Regionalism' A Dead Issue?
I would not now be flogging a horse that some have taken to be dead if it were not for two questions that were recently directed to me. Present-day scholars and critics say about regionalism, surely with the acceptance, even enshrinement, of Faulkner and Cather and O'Connor (Flannery or Frank) in the academy, the infrastructure of English departments across the United States has stopped patronizing "regional" writing. Perhaps in an ideal sense that is true, yes, but consider these two questions directed to me by a friendly professor from a university in the East: (1) What sorts of things sustain a writer, or any artist, in what many people see as the isolated geography of North Dakota? (2) Do you ever think that the undervaluation of your work may be a function of geography, of place?
The answer to the first, of course, is food. And I genuinely appreciate "undervaluation" in
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