Good advice from an old source...

These days I find myself hard at work on a conference presentation on Sherwood Bonner. There isn't a whole lot published about her, so you can read just about every source there is on her, including articles we might ignore in other cases because they are a bit dated. Every once in a while, an old source yields some great critical insights and reminders for contemporary critics. Case in point: this by Merrill M. Skaggs from 1978, a review of William L. Frank's book on Bonner.

Skaggs' review is pretty darn harsh, as he takes Frank to task for trying to force Bonner's works into categories that they simply don't fit. I don't want to get into the intricacies of his arguments, but Skaggs' words are a useful reminder for anyone writing about American literature.

I'll quote (at length) from the end of the review, where his remarks seem especially relevant for a wider audience of critics:

“Several simple observations should be mentioned here. First, American literature does not develop neatly within self-contained ‘periods’ like impatiens sprigs planted in spring, flourishing in summer, and dying at first frost. If one must compare literary qualities to plants, one must remember that these plants are perennials which pop up in other seasons, though perhaps in somewhat different shapes and sizes. Some Realism, Romanticism, and Naturalism can be spotted in almost any year, in the plots of almost any good writer; and the clever critic recognizes that everything in the garden which is not a rose is still not necessarily onion grass. Secondly, we academics earn ourselves a bad name assume that all literature which does not match our labels for a particular square of historical ground must be out-of-place, ignored, rooted out, or tilled under....

The critic’s primary obligation, like the grammarian’s, is not to prescribe but to describe. Thus, if one wished to draw attention to a hitherto neglected writer like Sherwood Bonner, one does not assume that the writer must be shown to fit an established and respectable category as ‘Realist.' One finds a new and interesting way of describing such strengths as Bonner naturally possesses. One tries first of all to describe the sources for continuing appeal of regionalist writing. In short, one judges Bonner or any other writer in terms consistent with what that writer tried to accomplish in the first place. It is not the critic’s obligation to deny what Bonner did—to try to prune off all the branches which fail to fit the critic’s idea of a nice shape. The good critic leaves the pruning to the writer and tries to describe what dimensions in the writer’s shapes permitted the plant to endure” (159-160).

The project I'm currently working on does deal with Bonner, categorization, and labels, but as I work on it, it would do me a lot of good to Skaggs' words in mind. Outside of the introductory or survey class, I've found it more enriching and rewarding to focus on ways that works resist categorization--or at least being squeezed into and confined by one label.

Just in case you are interested, the full citation for the article:
Skaggs, Merrill M. “Southern Compost.” Southern Literary Journal 10.2 (Spring 1978): 155-160.