Every Leaf a Mirror by Morris Allen Grubbs

Author:Morris Allen Grubbs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky

Living into the Land

The following essay first appeared in 1989 in Hemlocks and Balsams, the Lees-McRae College literary magazine. It is among Miller’s more than 150 essays, editorials, chapters, and the like. As Joyce Dyer, who has compiled a helpful bibliography of his nonfiction, has noted in “‘Accepting Things Near’: Bibliography of Non-fiction by Jim Wayne Miller,” “Miller’s deep commitment to serving his region takes the form not only of frequent cultural commentary, but also of specific tributes to the men and women who made a deep and lasting contribution to Appalachian life and letters” (Appalachian Journal 30.1 [Fall 2002]: 64–73).

H. L. Mencken was fond of saying that our task as writers is not so much to discover new truths as it is to correct old errors. The notion that all literature is local somewhere, and that therefore the universal not only can be found in the regional, but must be found there, if anywhere, is not a new truth. Imaginative writing of all genres deals with particulars. The poet, Shakespeare says in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “gives to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name,” which is to say the poet’s abstractions reside in particulars. All effective writers of poetry and fiction choose “a bright particular star,” as Shakespeare puts it in All’s Well That Ends Well. Neither art nor science, William Blake insists in Jerusalem, can exist “but in minutely organized Particulars.” Traditional “universal-worship,” William James concludes in Psychology, “can only be called a bit of perverse sentimentalism, a philosophic ‘idol of the cave.’” Oliver Wendell Holmes writes: “You must see the infinite, i.e., the universal, in your particular, or it is only gossip.” Flannery O’Conner understood this philosophical error of “universal-worship,” and she knew, as George Ella Lyon points out, that “the best American fiction has always been regional.”

Why then must we, where the reception and evaluation of literature is concerned, be forever correcting this old error, as if it were the stone of Sisyphus? There are many reasons. In the twentieth century, the success of the natural sciences, and their prevalence in our lives, surely has enhanced the reputation of the scientific method, which is to subsume many particulars under a general order. We are impressed not by the particulars but by the general order. J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the first atom bomb was built, writes, in The Open Mind, that the success of the sciences has made us “a little obtuse to the role of the contingent and particular in life.”

The literary modernism which has dominated critical perspectives in America in the twentieth century is biased against identification with place and hence against particular regions. Literary modernists such as Pound, Eliot, and Joyce, according to the critic George Steiner in Extraterritorial, are examples of a “strategy of permanent exile,” writers who share a condition of “unhousedness” and “extraterritoriality” which has characterized the most influential writers and writing in our time.

The essential extraterritorial nature of the American national

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