Outside the Southern Myth

by Noel Polk

Like many other southern men Noel Polk doesn't fit the outside world's stereotype of the southern male. This notable Faulkner critic is a native of the small Mississippi city of Picayune. In his career as an international scholar and traveler and in his role as a teacher and a professor of literature he has moved beyond his origins while continuing to be nourished by his hometown roots. In Outside the Southern Myth Polk offers an apologia for a huge segment of southern males and communities that don't belong in the media portraits. His town was not antebellum. There were no plantations. No Civil War battles were fought there. It had little racial divisiveness. It was one of the thousands that mushroomed along the railroads as a response to logging and milling industries. It was mainly middle-class, not reactionary or exclusive. While evoking both the pleasures and the problems of his past - band trips, a yearning for cityscapes, religious conversion, awakening to the realities of fundamentalist fervor - Polk offers himself, his family, and his town to exemplify an aspect that is more "American" than "Southern" and a tradition that is not mired in the past.

213 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1997

Reviews

[Skipr · Rating 2 out of 5]

Noel Polk grew up in the 1950s and 60s in Picayune, which has been my hometown for the past 33 years. Interesting that in the nearly twenty years since the book was published in 1997, I've never heard anyone even mention the book. It's not like there's a long shelf of books about Picayune to at the local library.

According to the author's obituary from 2009, Polk "was an internationally recognized literary scholar and gifted professor. Regarded by many as the preeminent Faulkner scholar of his generation, he was a central figure in Faulkner studies for forty years."

Well, it's not like I'm steeped in Faulkner studies, but I would have thought an "internationally recognized literary scholar," from our small town, who actually wrote one of the few books ever published about our small town might have generated at least a passing comment during conversations I've been a part of over the past 20+ years. But, no.

Polk does Picayune a favor by making the case, as stated in his title, that growing up in the 50s and 60s in Picayune meant growing up "outside the southern myth," a myth that has enthralled the media, and especially a lot of non-Southerners (dare I say, "Yankees"?). To the surprise of many, one could grow up in a southern town in the 1950s and 60s without having all the stock accoutrements of plantations, high racial tensions, sharecroppers, etc. Those were in fact the defining cultural realities in many parts of the South, Picayune--and no doubt many other Southern towns--missed out on these ingredients in their rawest, most undiluted form.

That's not to say that Polk glosses over the racially-motivated social inequalities, inequities, and discrimination of Picayune in the 50s and 60s. But, for those who believe that the Mississippi of the last century was monolithically the land of lynchings and church burnings, Polk provides a testimony to the contrary.

I wonder if the lack of local chatter (or pride?) about the author or his book might be at least partially due to Polk's condescending tone in writing about his hometown. Despite Polk's repeated disclaimer that he thinks that the folks of Picayune are by and large a nice and certainly respect bunch, he consistently comes across as the enlightened academic who has now risen above the parochialism of his youth.

When it comes to the Baptist brand of Christianity that Polk grew up in, he leaves condescension behind and goes into full-out sarcastic, what-a-bunch-of-malarkey, attack dog mode. To say that the faith of his youth left a bad taste in his mouth is an understatement.

Not satisfied to excoriate Southern Baptists, Polk launches a tirade against Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount. (I thought this book was supposed to be about the town of Picayune and southern culture?) Polk considers statements such as "Blessed are the poor," and "Blessed are the meek," as pie-in-the-sky distractions for people who instead ought to be rising up and asserting their rights and fighting for their piece of the pie in this life. For Polk, Christianity, and in particular the Southern Baptist way of living out that religion, is a delusion that will suck the soul out of you and obliterate your sense of self and self-worth.

Reading his chapter-long rant against faith is sad. And boring. I hope Polk felt better after writing it.

[Jeffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

When it comes to Southern meditations, I've found no equivalent to the work of Margaret Renkl. But I enjoyed this book. Polk's insightful examination of his early years and of the seemingly commonplace community that surrounded him growing up in the 1950s and 60s is full of interesting local stories and observations. Being a literary critic by training not only allows him to weave in comparisons to various Southern characters, but it also supplies him with the ability to observe his subject matter from many different perspectives. The blidungsromanesque chapter on his formative experiences as a member of the Picayune High School band is the best in the book, interspersed as it is with cultural criticism like this:

A good deal of a band's function is to recreate the circus, to invoke the carnival atmosphere of celebration and ecstasy, of the escape from the daily; the spectacle is a central part of carnival. But small towns fear carnival's looseness, its untidiness, its potential for a problematical pleasure, and so perhaps the band also simultaneously provides an acceptable way of having carnival and of controlling it too, of keeping it in bounds, as spectacle, as something we watch from a distance: the color, the sensuous brassy outrageous and familiar music, the multicolored flags and uniforms, the majorettes--our daughter and sisters or those of our friends--the ogle respectfully and respectably.

The longest chapter in the book, One Baptist Son, is a blend of memoir and religious criticism. I found it worthy of inclusion, but in need of a stronger editorial hand that could have brought greater concision. That said, I'd recommend it to Southern Baptists, not because I think it will shake their faith, but because it is a highly critical piece written nonetheless with great warmth towards Southern Baptists; there's nothing shrill about his probing.

Finally, let me just say how happy I was to find town planning criticism in this book. Polk notes that Picayune was not that old when he was growing up; some of the town founders were in fact still alive. I really appreciate how he described the physical layout of Picayune, Mississippi and then offered up some possible meanings behind the landscape of the place he knew so well. (C) Jeffrey L. Otto, December 12, 2023

[Dwayne Coleman · Rating 5 out of 5]

My rating may be a bit inflated for this one because the author was once my academic adviser in college and someone I admired. He also happened to be the editor for the entire series of Vintage Books' editions of Faulkner's novels. The book talks about the author being born and raised in the South but not being able to identify himself in the mythology of the South and its natives. (I can often relate myself.) It also ends up being about his relationship with his father and becomes poignant in the process. It's a touching story well-written, and it makes me wish that I'd gotten to know Dr. Polk better.