• James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice: A Reappraisal
• Izabela Hopkins

In The Miller of Old Church, published in 1911 and set in her native Virginia where time all but stands still, Ellen Glasgow uses the voice of Abel Revercomb to verbalize what she sees as the southern malady and the blighted legacy of the Old South. Abel, the eponymous miller, observes of Old Church, and by extension of the South, that “[t]he world he moved in was peopled by a race of beings that acted under ideal laws and measured up to an impossible standard” (164). The ideal laws and impossible standards that form an inextricable part of the southern mythology center on the conception of aristocratic heritage as a staple of southern identity and police the behavior of men and women. None can escape conformity, and Glasgow’s characters’ struggles to imitate or elevate themselves to the vaunted archetype become lost causes predetermined by the very inaccessibility of the standards they wish to emulate. Although Glasgow was not immune to the “imperishable charm,” she never tired of exposing the debilitating effect of the Old South mythology on growth and progress, opining that what the South needed to reinvigorate itself was “blood and irony”—blood because it “was satisfied to exist on borrowed ideas” and irony because it is “the safest antidote to sentimental decay” (A Certain Measure 12, 28). James Branch Cabell, her contemporary and fellow Richmonder, responded to Glasgow’s call for exposing the pernicious influence of Old South sentimentalism and its stale ideal of aristocratic descent on the conception of southern identity. The result, an ambiguous and ironic novel, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice, was published in 1919.¹ It is [End Page 143] a text of literary and cultural contradictions, simultaneously reificatory and deconstructive—reificatory because it acknowledges the allure of the myth of aristocratic descent to the southern mind, deconstructive because it reveals the shaky foundations on which it is built.²

This reification-deconstruction dialectic leads to an aporia, a nonresolution, emblematic of the struggle of an identity formed through the politics of mythopoeia and historic recycling. Cabell, according to Louis D. Rubin, Jr., was “more fully conscious of exactly what as a novelist he was doing, and why he was doing it, than any other American author” (No Place on Earth viii). What he was doing was debunking on a large scale the myths of aristocratic descent, chivalry, and idealized femininity that shaped southern consciousness and identity. As a writer, Cabell, unlike his character John Charteris in The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck who is also a novelist, refused to “prattle of ‘ole Marster’ and ‘ole Miss,’ and throw in a sprinkling of ‘mockin’-buds’ and ‘hants’ and ‘horg-killing time,’ and of sweeping animadversions as to all ‘free niggers’; and to narrate how ‘de quality use ter cum’” (158). A “Yankee cap’en” conveniently shot in “de laig” and a “Young Miss” who “had him fotch up ter de gret hous” complete the list of Charteris’s “main ingredients” for cooking up a southern novel (15, 9). Instead of this tried and tested formula that worked well for fellow Virginian novelists like Thomas Nelson Page, Cabell opted for, in Delmore Schwartz’s words, “dandyism of speech and florid irony” (Doyle 181); or, what he called “contrapuntal prose,” which became not just the hallmark of his style but a medium through which he could trade in truths not necessarily palatable to his southern readership (MacDonald, James Branch Cabell 218). The publication of Jurgen, which Joseph Hergesheimer called a “very strange and very beautiful book,” with its prompt suppression by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and Exoneration, brought him short-lived fame and notoriety (Colum and Freeman 133).³ In the long run, Cabell’s “lovely bits of gymnastic writing” (MacDonald, James Branch Cabell 218) proved too much for the [End Page 144] reading public, so much so that by mid-twentieth century he had become a rara avis.⁴ A brief revival of Cabell’s works in the 1980s deliberately downplayed the complexity of his writing and succeeded only in...

• 詹姆斯·布兰奇·卡贝尔的尤尔根：正义喜剧：重新评价
• 伊莎贝拉·霍普金斯

我ñ 牛逼，他中号Iller河畔的Ø LD Ç hurch，发表在1911年和集她弗吉尼亚本土的时间几乎停滞不前，艾伦·格拉斯哥用亚伯·雷弗科姆的声音来表达她所看到的南部疾病和旧南部的枯萎遗产。同名磨坊主亚伯 (Abel) 观察到旧教堂和南方的延伸，“他搬入的世界居住着一群按照理想法则行事并达到不可能标准的种族”（164 ）。构成南方神话中不可分割的一部分的理想法律和不可能的标准集中在贵族遗产作为南方身份的主要内容的概念上，并控制着男人和女人的行为。没有人能逃脱从众，格拉斯哥的角色努力模仿或将自己提升到引以为豪的原型，这成为他们希望效仿的标准的不可接近性所预先确定的迷失原因。某种措施12, 28)。与她同时代的里士满人詹姆斯·布兰奇·卡贝尔回应了格拉斯哥的呼吁，要求揭露旧南方多愁善感主义及其陈旧的贵族血统理想对南方身份概念的有害影响。结果，一部模棱两可且具有讽刺意味的小说《尤尔根：正义喜剧》于 1919 年出版^。1它是[End Page 143]文学和文化矛盾的文本，同时具有具体化和解构性——具体化是因为它承认了南方人的贵族血统神话，具有解构性，因为它揭示了它赖以建立的摇摇欲坠的基础。²

这种物化与解构的辩证法导致了一种困境，一种无法解决的问题，象征着通过神话和历史循环政治形成的身份斗争。根据小路易斯·D·鲁宾 (Louis D. Rubin, Jr.) 的说法，卡贝尔“比任何其他美国作家都更清楚自己作为小说家到底在做什么，以及为什么要这样做”（《地球上的无名之地》（No Place on Earth viii））。他所做的是大规模揭穿塑造南方意识和身份的贵族血统、骑士精神和理想化的女性气质的神话。作为一名作家，卡贝尔不同于他在《祖父的脖子上的铆钉》中的角色约翰·查特里斯他也是一位小说家，拒绝“喋喋不休地谈论‘老马斯特’和‘老小姐’，并加入一些‘嘲弄’花蕾”和“哈特”和“霍格杀戮时间”，以及广泛的动画版本，如致所有“自由黑鬼”；并讲述'de quality use ter cum'”（158）。一个在“de laig”方便地拍摄的“Yankee cap'en”和一个“让他找了ter de gret hous”的“年轻小姐”完成了Charteris编写南方小说的“主要成分”清单（15, 9 ）。用德尔莫尔施瓦茨的话来说，卡贝尔并没有采用这种久经考验的公式，这种公式对像托马斯·纳尔逊·佩奇这样的弗吉尼亚小说家很有效，而是选择了“言语的花哨和华丽的讽刺”（Doyle 181）；或者，他所谓的“对位散文，詹姆斯·布兰奇·卡贝尔218)。Jurgen的出版，被 Joseph Hergesheimer 称为“非常奇怪和非常美丽的书”，被纽约制止罪恶和免罪协会迅速压制，给他带来了短暂的名声和恶名（Colum and Freeman 133） . ³从长远来看，Cabell 的“体操写作的可爱片段”（MacDonald, James Branch Cabell 218）对[End Page 144]公众阅读来说太过分了，以至于到 20 世纪中叶，他已经成为一个稀有的人. ⁴ 1980 年代卡贝尔作品的短暂复兴刻意淡化了他写作的复杂性，仅在……