A Jewish Vanderbilt? Robert Penn Warren’s Racialization of the New Criticism

Abstract

This article explores the strange discourse on Jewishness in Robert Penn Warren’s The Cave. In particular, it reads that ethno-religious specter as a cognitive map for the emerging New Criticism. While many of Warren’s Southern literary peers like Donald Davidson had come by the 1950s to view the New Criticism as irreducibly Southern—indeed, as irreducibly derived from an exclusionary form of white metaphysics—Warren’s own attitude was decidedly more ambivalent. His novel, this article demonstrates, finds in Jewishness a vehicle for thematizing the hybridization that Southern literary study would require, and therefore writes the repressed autobiography of the New Criticism. But the book also pays off a more literal debt to Jewishness. Faulkner’s canonization, after all—and in turn the Southernness he congealed—was due in no small part to Jewish critics like Fiedler, Trilling, and Howe, who sung the Mississippian’s praises in the late 1940s and early 50s. If The Cave confesses its debt to Jewishness, then, it does so in both intellectual and institutional terms, simultaneously reorienting ongoing inquiries into the racial economy haunting the New Criticism and supplies a crucial episode in the ongoing historical enjambment of Southern and Jewish cultural identities at the middle of the American century.