Some borders are more permeable than others.

As I've begun to think a bit deeper about the ramifications of letting the South secede, I've realized there are large questions that need to be answered before such an event were to take place. Most pressing of these, of course, is how to handle teaching William Faulkner.

Faulkner was, of course, a Southerner. Would a newly re-reconstructed United States literature have to let Faulkner go as well? Obviously, he would become part of the canon of Confederate States literature (along with several other luminaries), but technically when writing he was part of the United States.

Many Southerners didn't like him in his first few decades of writing; they felt that he was too interested in decay and debauchery -- too lurid, perhaps exploiting the South for the North's entertainment. Of course, Southerners weren't alone in their hostility or apathy toward Faulkner; his books were basically out of print and he was almost forgotten until Malcolm Cowley (from my neck of the backwoods) put together The Viking Portable Faulkner and the rest was history.

Now what about his fellow Mississippian, Richard Wright, who in no way could be considered sympathetic to the "lost cause"? Wright's career as a writer is launched in Chicago (unless you count the childhood story he wrote, "The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre") and involves a renunciation of the South (see for example the sketch "How Bigger Was Born"). Of course, Wright's Native Son goes on to repudiate northern racism as well, and Wright himself eventually moves to France to escape the omnipresent racism that permeated even the supposedly cosmopolitan metropolis of New York City.

I figure in the end they'll enjoy the fate bestowed upon T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, wherein they're claimed by more than one "national" literature. It will open up new arenas for Faulkner studies -- a field already broad and deep -- in which scholars will be able to take positions on whether Faulkner was pro-separatist or pro-Union (in the broad sense). As for Wright, Confederate States literature professors will be challenged -- although like most lit professors it will delight them -- to justify teaching a man so utterly disgusted with the "southern way of life" (e.g. similar to current challenges to "anti-American" art or writing).

And then some: will the Southern Agrarians be taught as uncompromising heroes? Is Flannery O'Connor beautiful or damned?