Time and the Tide in the Southern Short StorynPerhaps since the War Between the States itself, andncertainly since the literary Southern Renascence becamenconscious of itself in the 30’s and 40’s, educatednSoutherners, and Southern writers especially, have takenntheir sense of history as a point of pride. Now, as the end ofnthe century approaches, one may be tempted to wondernwhether this pride has degenerated into mere vanity —ndeclining from the deadliest of sins to a mere venal one.nThat special Southern historical sense may have become nonmore than a conventional piety of a style of Southernnliterary criticism, which, as the novelist Madison Jones wasnheard to mutter in the audience of a critical panel five yearsnago, has long since passed “beyond refinement.”nIn any event, the deep sense of history is less likely to benassociated with short Southern stories than with big Southernnnovels: Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha opus, Robert PennnWarren’s excursion to the regional past. Roots even, ornGeorge Garrett’s Elizabethan trilogy; those last two worksncarry a sharpened awareness of history into other regionsnaltogether. Short stories, on the other hand, are not expectednto express the long continuum from past into present,nalthough they very well can, and sometimes still do.nThe two surviving elder statesmen of the Southern shortnstory, Eudora Welty and Peter Taylor, have moved in quitendrastically different directions in their use of time in theirnwork. In this narrow sense. Miss Welty’s stories appear to benmore conventional, by contemporary standards. The span ofntime they typically seek to portray is brief: the day, the hour,nthe moment. Their effect is an immediate effect. Althoughnthere are powerful historical currents running through manynof Miss Welty’s stories, their channels are mostly subterranean.nMadison Smartt Bell, a Tennessean, is the author of ThenWashington Square Ensemble and Soldier’s Joy, amongnother books. His most recent novel, Doctor Sleepn(Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), was published in January.nby Madison Smartt BellnSo it is with “The Hitch-Hikers,” one of her best (each ofnher stories is one of her best). The traveling salesman Harrisnis a desperately dislocated man who can only recognize hisncondition by contrast to the two tramps he picks up in hisncar, whose language itself reflects a certainty of identity thatnHarris can in no way match: “I come down from thenhills. . . . We had us owls for chickens and fox for yard dogsnbut we sung true.” After Harris stops for the night in a hotel,nthe two tramps quarrel over a scheme to make off with hisncar, and one of them kills the other by clubbing him with anbottle. What could it mean to a man like Harris?nIn his room, Harris lay down on the bed withoutnundressing or turning out the light. He was toontired to sleep. Half blinded by the unshaded bulbnhe stared at the bare plaster walls and the equallynwhite surface of the mirror above the empty dresser.nPresently he got up and turned on the ceiling fan,nto create some motion and sound in the room. Itnwas a defective fan which clicked with eachnrevolution, on and on. He lay perfectly still beneathnit, with his clothes on, unconsciously breathing in anrhythm related to the beat of the fan.nOne would hardly wish to be any nearer a moment thannthis. Of course it is a distinctly null moment. It is frozen,nexcept for the clocklike sound and movement of the fan,nwhich insists on the story’s oppressive proximity to real time.nHe could forgive nothing in this evening. But it wasntoo like other evenings, this town was too like otherntowns, for him to move out of this lying still clothednon the bed, even into comfort or despair. Even thenrain: there was often rain, there was often a party,nand there had been other violence not of hisndoing — other fights, not quite so pointless, butnfights in his car; fights, unheralded confessions,nsudden lovemaking — none of any of this his, notnnnMARCH 1991/27n