The Southwestern Humorists

In days of yore, or so I'm told, critics had an unfortunate tendency to dismiss the 19th century southwestern frontier as something of a literary wasteland. In doing so they merely followed the popular sentiment, alas still alive and well today, that those states that had aligned themselves with slaveholders in the Civil War could only be untutored racist barbarians, too morally and spiritually impoverished to be capable of great literature on the same level with their genteel and cultured brethren to the North. However, the rising tide of a rapidly opening canon over the last half century has brought to light many texts otherwise ignored, and it is no longer acceptable to assume that Mark Twain and William Faulkner, for example, sprung up unassisted from the scorched earth of the American South. Reading the Southwestern Humorists, we discover their roots grown long in the rich soil of a significant frontier literary tradition.

Southwestern Humor was in its heyday in the decades leading up to the Civil War, 1830-1861 when William T. Porter's Spirit of the Times, a weekly New York sporting paper, was known for its humorous sketches. The authors of these sketches often hailed from the southwestern frontier territories, from Georgia and Alabama, Tennessee and Missouri. Their gentlemen narrators sought to record for public consumption the way of life in these wild proto-states, the dialect of their people, and the unique humor of the rugged frontiersman. Widely read outside of New England (still under the thumb of the literary giants in Boston), the Spirit of the Times was a success due in large part to the anti-romantic, realistic writings of the southwest.

The authors who penned these tales were not professional "men of letters" (like New Englanders Emerson and Thoreau) but doctors and lawyers deeply engaged in the lives of the communities about which they wrote. Men like Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, Kittrell J. Warren, and George Washington Harris lived and worked, for the most part, in the communities that appear in their stories, and the narrators they created were similar to themselves. Intimate outsiders, the authors and their narrators were too educated to truly fit into the worlds they wrote about, but ideally situated to describe them.

Reading what they describe is always a curious experience and occasionally rather hard to take since much of what must have been considered humorous in the 19th century is rather appalling now. The description of the casual abuse of slaves and animals and the brutal violence of everyday relationships would scarcely be tolerated in today's strangely moral publishing world, unless their depiction was accompanied by a multitude of disclaimers and a healthy moral at the close. But these authors give it to us raw; while evil is often punished and good rewarded, it seems more accidental than anything else. Universal justice is by no means to be relied upon. As Richard Boyd Hauck argues in A Cheerful Nihilism (1971) readers will find in the protagonists of this literary tradition a nihilism that renders them incapable of making meaning in an absurd world. Though they are often adept at pulling a confidence trick, these protagonists lack the ability to create and maintain confidence, both in themselves and in the world around them.