reference to African Americans. Increasingly throughout the twentieth century, African Americans were positioned as referential structures for whites, and within the dominant -412- cultural constructs they became more visibly operatives, if limited, as opposed to being merely respondents. By mid-century, Richard Wright would reflect that 'the Negro is America's metaphor,' by which he intended to conflate the African American's moral and political struggle for parity and recognition with the nation's grasp of its ideals of equality and freedom. Whether or not Wright formulated an exaggerated claim for the position of the African American within a reading of the American condition, he nonetheless identified race as a major point for accessing meanings about twentieth-century America.
Race is in part a metaphorical construction, as Wright may have implied in his statement. The dominant group usually does not construct its own identity by delineating its specific racialism. Race as a classification is more typically used against others — those who are different from the majority, different from those in control of language and tradition. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has observed: 'Race has become a trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between cultures, linguistic groups, or adherents of specific belief systems which — more often than not — also have fundamentally opposed economic interests. Race is the ultimate trope of difference because it is so very arbitrary in its application.'
Whether arbitrary or not, the apprehension of race and racial ideologies marks much of the writing of the early twentieth century. W. E. B. Du Bois exposed the problem of the twentieth century as the problem of the color line in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). He suggested that race as a sociocultural construct was the battleground for the delineation of a modern self within society. Debilitating views of racial inferiority not only constricted the potential of people of color, those within the veil, but also limited the development of people who, by reason of their Caucasian ancestry, could only view the world in hierarchical terms, with themselves at the higher end of intellectual, moral, and cultural achievement. Undergirding Du Bois's notion of the color line is his conception of the centrality of race: 'The history of the world is the history, not of individuals, but of groups, not of nations, but of races, and he who ignores or seeks to override the race idea in human history ignores and overrides the central thought of all history.'
For writers in the American South, racial identity was one of the -413- givens of their literary and cultural perspectives. Owing to a shared regional heritage with slavery as a major component and a present existence with segregation as a legal practice replete with 'For Colored Only' and 'For Whites Only' signs in public places, few Southern authors of any race could ignore the idea of race in social history, though not all chose overtly racial matter for their writings. Flannery O'Connor, who recognized that one source of tension in human existence had very much to do with belonging and not-belonging, was nevertheless uncomfortable with representing the other, the African American, in her rural world. In a letter she observed her discomfort with African American subjects, making her perhaps one of the few Southern writers of her generation to acknowledge the difficulty of entering into the consciousness of characters of a different race: 'The two colored people in 'The Displaced Person' are on this place now…I can only see them from the outside. I wouldn't have the courage of Miss Shirley Ann Grau to go inside their heads.' O'Connor was responding to Grau's collection of short stories, The Black Prince and Other Stories (1954), that announced her entry into the field of Southern fiction linking race and region (New Orleans and Louisiana for Grau), and that anticipated her Pulitzer Prize novel The Keepers of the House (1964), which treated a dynamic family saga against a Louisiana backdrop of interracial marriage, miscegenation, and racial prejudice. Interestingly enough, unlike Grau, O'Connor was not at all comfortable with her native region though she depicted it almost exclusively as setting, background, and force in fiction.
Neither of O'Connor's novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), treats race as a significant aspect of region; however, in several of her short stories published in the posthumous volume Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), she turned to an exploration of racial interaction just as the Civil Rights movement began to change the face of the South. In altering her perspective, O'Connor was much like Robert Penn Warren, one of the Nashville Fugitives during the 1920s and one of the Southern Agrarians in the 1930s.
In 1923, Robert Penn Warren began publishing poetry in The Fugitive, the little magazine founded by a group of Vanderbilt University professors and Nashville intellectuals who showed little interest in race as configured in the South. After graduation from Vanderbilt -414- in 1925, Warren studied at the University of California (M.A., 1927), at Yale University (1927-28), and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at New College, Oxford University (B. Litt., 1930), where he completed a biography, John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (1929), and wrote 'The Briar Patch,' an essay defending segregation on economic grounds for I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition by Twelve Southerners (1930). His earliest writings suggested that he had wider areas of interest than the majority of his Fugitive or his Agrarian cohorts.
Although known as a poet and scholar throughout his long career, Warren was also one of the major novelists to emerge from the modern South. His first novel, Night Rider (1939), evolved out of his long story Prime Leaf (1931), a treatment of the early twentieth-century tobacco wars in Kentucky's Cumberland Valley, and established his concerns with issues of class and conscience. At Heaven's Gate (1943), World Enough and Time (1950), The Cave (1959), and A Place to Come To (1977), all reflect a characteristic tendency in his fiction to combine philosophical meditation, individual idealism, and deterministic naturalism. Jed Tewkesbury, the poor white in search of happiness along with material success, discovers in A Place to Come To, 'It is not that I cannot stand solitude. Perhaps I stand it too easily, and have been, far beyond my own knowing, solitary all my life.' Jed's conclusion in Warren's last novel is comparable to Jack Burden's in Warren's best-known novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning All the King's Men (1946), which traces the rise and fall of a New South self-made politician, Willie Stark, whose story is based on Louisiana governor Huey P. Long. Jack Burden, Warren's prototypical protagonist, proceeds from an ironic vision of an alienated self in a mechanized world to a compassionate, yet terrifying understanding of human and cosmic interdependence: '…and soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.'
Warren's meditations on history and the individual's relationship to historical process invariably brought him to a consideration of slavery and its impact on the individual, particularly the white Southerner. The historical novel Band of Angels (1955), with its focus on the Civil War and the consequences of miscegenation, and the experimental Brother to Dragons (1953; rev. 1979), with its imagina-415- tive exploration of Thomas Jefferson's response to his kinsmen's ax murder of a slave, demonstrate Warren's commitment to untangling the complicated racial heritage and conflicted moral agency of individuals functioning within a closed social and political system. Both texts revealed his increasing interest in race relations in Southern history, which he attended to explicitly in an analysis of the region's 'separate but equal' educational system, Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (1956), in a discourse on the 1960s Civil Rights movement, Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965), and in a final book of poetry, Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé (1983). Warren's associates from the Nashville groups of his youth, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, and Andrew Lytle among others, would not have anticipated his empathetic turn to race-specific materials and issues.
Yet, as James Weldon Johnson observed in the novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912; 1927) of the omnipresent race question: 'It would be safe to wager that no group of Southern white men could get together and talk for sixty minutes without bringing up 'the race question.' If a Northern white man happened to be in the group, the time could be safely cut to thirty minutes.' Johnson collapsed the debates about race into a dialogue between representatives of the different possible positions. Removing the discussion from a fixed landscape in either the North or the South, he utilized as setting for the dialogue the neutral territory of a train, yet in his portrait even the mobile, contained site could not foster a conciliation of the multiple, antagonistic threads of racial discourse. Johnson suggested that the problem of race is grounded in individual and group perspectives and within specific historical moments, by which he attempted to show that the problem is static and, thus, subject to change.
For white and black Southerners writing in the first half of the century, communal perspectives and historical contexts were not so easily disengaged from the individual's position within the society and at a fixed point in time. W. J. Cash in The Mind of the South (1941) attempted to chart the psychological history
