Noel Polk: Living Outside History

Noel Polk is an emeritus professor of English who specialises in the American novel.

The following is a response to a talk given by Polk at UNSW on the 28th of April 2010, where he presented readings and reflections on his 1997 autobiographical book titled “Outside the Southern Myth”.

In addition to contributing to the field of American literature studies to which Polk himself belongs, this presentation dealt with three main areas of theory, namely: history; identity; and knowledge. Polk used the subjective contingency of theories, concepts and language to reveal the diversity inherent in social reality.

History:

Polk understands history as what people proclaim to remember of the past. Thus, when Polk describes his ‘living outside of history’, what he is referring to are the grand historical narratives, such as the American Civil War, rather than the micro-histories that directly confront and affect him, such as the relationship with his father. This becomes apparent when reading a passage from his book that describes an emotionally charged, seemingly irrational encounter between him and his father which is initially told from Polk’s point-of-view as a youth. This first account is later tempered by reflection from an older, wiser, perspective from which Polk is able to intuit the causation behind his fathers behaviour by locating him in relation to the larger socio-historical contexts.

Identity:

As a youth Polk’s identity as a “Southerner” was based upon a geographical rather than historical understanding of the term. The young Polk responded empirically to his tangible and social environment: The small, out-of-the way town he grew up in (Picayune) did not memorialise the American Civil War with monuments, and his circle of family and friends did not overtly encourage slavery. That black students were segregated to their own school was encountered as a fact needless of being questioned.

Knoweldge:

W. B. Yeats famously declared that “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire”. Polk attests to this, recognising that despite receiving tuition in history throughout his school career, the historically produced connotation of what it meant to be “Southern” did not occur to him till much later, after he had left Picayune and begun studying at University.

Polk’s presentation problematises ‘history’ as something both socially and materially negotiated, as well as something that is encountered and understood at a personalised, individual level. A disjoint may thus exist between ‘objective’ (macro/social) accounts of history, and those ‘subjectively’ (micro/personally) experienced.

As a function of myth, history tells us that being “Southern” means to be this or that way. It means to talk with ‘that’ accent, and to have ‘those’ attitudes and beliefs: It creates a mythic identity. Claiming to have ‘lived outside of history’ is a provocative statement. It implies a distinction between socially constructed and natural histories, where, to live outside of both means to have never existed at all. When Polk claimed to have lived ‘outside history’ he was referring to his youthful lack of understanding about the American Civil War, and later, the discord between the narratives and stereotypes of that mythic history, and his direct personal experiences. His subsequently difficulty in identifying with that history is evident; saying, “[it was] not my history. Not yet.” As Polk grew up and advanced his education he was eventually able to recognise that the mythologisation of the South “had always been my war”. And it was coming to terms with this that finally allowed Polk to personally reconcile the rift between he and his father, despite that his father had long since passed.