You can’t change history if you are [weighed down by history].
—Clint Mathis, May
Zeus! Give me coolness! Give me the...[sic] will to avoid!
—Conrad’s prayer in Tom Wolfe,A Man in Full,
The suburban Georgian Clint Mathis, only twenty-five, ad-
dressed the U.S. experience of invisibility (or humiliation)
in quadrennial World Cup competition on the eve of
match play. A fleet and improvisational striker whose boy-
hood hero was the unglued Argentinian star Diego Mara-
dona, Mathis was instrumentally blunt about U.S. soccer’s
unglorious past: Deal with it and move on, he advised.
At little later, in South Korea, Mathis—suddenly appear-
ing with a badly fashioned Mohawk haircut before at least
billionfutbolfans on global television—scored the goal
that put the United States into the cup quarter-finals. By
he had left the Metrostars of American professional
soccer for the Hanover team in Germany’s premier
Bundeslige. Mathis’s practical philosophy of history lin-
gers, meanwhile, reminding us of the literary historian Fred
Hobson’s take on southern postmodern fiction writers.
Beginning with Walker Percy, Hobson figures, southern lit-
erary imagination became autochthonous, which means
indigenous yet free of cultural and territorial entrapment.
Unlike modernists such as William Faulkner, who were pos-
sessed by and obsessed with history, postmodernists in-
terrogate memory in relative independence and discover
the funny as often as the morbid. If with Faulkner, Pickett’s
Charge is still happening, with Percy it is over yet still signi-
fying everywhere, often in absurd manifestations.^1 (InThe
Thanatos Syndrome, Percy’s last novel, published in ,
moldy, crumbling former slave quarters are converted to
hip , condos.) The autochthon is genuine native,
sprung from this earth, but never the captive and ever more
interested inhow tothanwhy. So postmodernism as fic-
