They enjoy a strategic advantage in that they have the means of conveying the impression that they themselves stand for what is forward-looking and alive; and they are content that the soft word regional should come to represent what the opposite party stood for: something, they would like to think, harmless and insignificant enough.
What are the conditions under which American literature can achieve its full maturity?
Regionalism is a name for a condition under which the national American literature exists as a literature: that is, its constant tendency to decentralize rather than to centralize; or to correct overcentralization by conscious decentralization. Or it describes the conditions and attitudes under which it is possible for literature to be a normal artistic outgrowth of the life of a region.
Good regional literature needs only the immediate, organic sense of life in which a fine artist works.
No other great literature has ever enjoyed the prospect open to us, of an almost indefinite enrichment from provincial sources that are not, in the usual sense of the word, provincial at all, for our provinces are more like nations than provinces. To use the opportunity well, we have need of a kind of Federal principle in our national criticism; and we ought to be suspicious of any contrary principle which would lay upon us the obligation to imitate the decadent stages of the kind of national literature we have never had.
The domestic problem is, not how shall we achieve a unity that may be spurious and deceptive, but how shall we secure the artistic and cultural equilibrium that will give free play to our divine regional geniuses.
They urge the provinces to adopt the intellectual sophistication of the Eastern metropolis, but among themselves they bewail the poverty of the modern temper, which in its sophistication has left them nothing to enjoy...
The danger is, however, that the regionalist, in attempting through folklore to express the genius of place, will be content merely to dwell among the artifacts he has dug up, and will thus narrow his expression almost to documentary limits.
Regionalists should be warned against retiring into folklore as into an ivory tower...only one feature of a regional literature.
And the modernist critics are right in their claim that modern issues cannot be evaded. The writer of a given region cannot shut himself away under the name, regionalist, but he must, from his region, confront the total and moving world.
Regionalism is not an end in itself, not a literary affectation, not an aesthetic credo, but a condition of literary realization. The function of a region is to endow the American artist with character and purpose. He is born of a region. He will deny its parenthood to his own hurt. Without its background he is a homeless exile in the wilderness of modern life. That self which he is, if not ignobly impugned, will readily be a modern self; and what he creates, if he can resist the perversion of our time, will be both the expression of the region and himself, no matter what the subject or what the style. It is the office of the nation to conserve and cherish this free effort, and surely never by precept or example to delude us into thinking that a novel about a ploughboy is only a regional curiosity, but a novel about a bellboy, a national masterpiece.
-Donald Davidson
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