Thursday, May 23, 1996
Noon
Daily Grind
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Chris Smith, who recently finished a paper on the rhetoric of the Old Southwestern
humorists, led the discussion. He began by giving us some background on
The Crockett Almanacs, a collection of humorous stories published
between 1835 and 1856. The stories recount the legendary exploits of such
larger-than-life figures as Davy Crockett, Mike Fink, Daniel Boone, and
Kit Carson. Chris explained that both the authorship and publication of
the stories is mysterious. While the stories generally are regarded as folklore
rather than literature, Chris pointed to parallels in these stories and
the literature of the Old Southwest, including the emphasis on oral delivery
and the frontier boast. In particular, Chris noted the similarity between
"Mike Fink's Brag" (Heath 1465) and a passage that Twain
wrote for Huck Finn and later omitted. (See "Frescoes from the
Past" section of Life on the Mississippi.).
We then moved to the major Old Southwestern writers and their works: Augustus
Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes (1835), Thomas Bangs Thorpe's
"Big Bear of Arkansas" (1841), Johnson Jones Hooper's Adventures
of Simon Suggs (1845), and George Washington Harris' Sut Lovingood.
Yarns Spun by a '"Nat'ral Born Durn'd Fool (1867). In addition
to reviewing the traditional characteristics of this writing--a sophisticated
narrator, colorful characters from the backwoods, exaggeration, dialect--we
noted peculiarities in some of the writers. Chris noted, for example, that
Longstreet saw himself as a "literary anthropologist" interested
in preserving the storytelling traditions of northern Georgia. We also discussed
the crude, "body-centered" nature of the Sut Lovingood stories
and the mockery of religion in both the Sut Lovingood stories and Adventures
of Simon Suggs.
The discussion gave rise to several questions. First, noting that Thorpe's
narrator writes overly stylized prose in "The Big Bear of Arkansas,"
Chris suggested that Thorpe and perhaps some of the other Old Southwestern
humorists sympathized with the backwoods characters, whom they sought to
elevate over the more proper, sophisticated classes. While it might be tempting
to generalize this attitude for the other humorists, Mark noted that some
of these writers were in real life more similar to their narrators than
to the backwoods characters; he also pointed out that the notion of a sophisticated
narrator describing eccentric rustics can be traced back to William Byrd,
who sometimes treated the rustics as amusing oddities rather than shrewd
heroes. Second, we also looked at the opening to "The Big Bear of Arkansas"
and noted the importance of the Mississippi steamboat as an inspiration
and source for other writers of the time, particularly Melville and Twain.
Finally, we tried to see Old Southwestern literature against the backdrop
of Jacksonian democracy and wondered whether the elevation of commoners
in politics helped to popularize or shape the elevation of them in this
literature. As we attempted to trace the attitudes and characteristics of
Old Southwestern humor back to an origin, Judy alluded to the picaresque
quality of Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry, and Chris Goodson suggested
parallels in the boasting, larger-than-life characters of medieval romance.