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Deliverance was on TV this week, not looking too bad for its 52 years. It’s still the film most responsible for the dissemination of some of the prevailing myths around rednecks (sexual deviance, intellectual impairment, banjo virtuosity). This is Southernness as horror – an expression of the fear and fascination with the American interior that is so extreme within the country as to be labelled by geographer David Jansson as “internal Orientalism”.
James Dickey, the author of the book on which the film is based, declared that “the best thing that ever happened to me was to have been born a Southerner – first as a man, and then as a writer.” Another Southern man and writer is in the headlines, JD Vance, and he’s also made a career of exoticising his nearest and dearest. Vance’s breakthrough was the publication of the memoir Hillbilly Elegy, published when he was 31, and full of lyrical anecdotes like this one: “Uncle Teaberry overheard a young man state a desire to “eat her panties,” a reference to his sister’s (my Mamaw’s) undergarments. Uncle Teaberry drove home, retrieved a pair of Mamaw’s underwear, and forced the young man – at knifepoint – to consume the clothing.” It’s incredible to think of Vance labouring over these sentences, which include four synonyms for underpants, as a demonstration of the self-determined, ethics-bound culture that he understands has been rejected by younger Southerners in favour of whining and lazing.
In a recent post on X addressing liberals’ shock at Trump’s second victory, Vance quoted Cormac McCarthy’s Anton Chigurh, the antagonist of No Country for Old Men: “If the rule that you followed brought you to this, then of what use was the rule?” It makes sense that Vance would have read McCarthy, one of the best authors on the South, though they have very different relationships to it. McCarthy’s Suttree, a berserk and baroque novel set in Tennessee, often depicts the South as an extension of Hell, “nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent” (here’s an echo of another famous Southern novel which takes its title from Macbeth). Hell, for Vance, is people who refuse to better themselves by stacking extremely heavy tiles in a warehouse until their cartilage disintegrates.
McCarthy’s depiction of the South is vastly more humane and interesting than Vance’s. Suttree, eponymous hero of the novel, regularly takes a river carp to an old ragman who lives under piles of newspaper under a bridge, and one day he finds the ragman dead. “You have no right to represent people this way,” he tells the corpse. “A man is all men. You have no right to your wretchedness.” As he knows, however, people do have a right to their wretchedness. If your rule makes you refuse this, of what use is your rule?
Nell Whittaker
MORE IN YOUR TANK
WATCH HERE
What’s gone wrong for democracy? The problem seems to be that for over two decades, the prevailing feature of Western democracy has been a carefully-curated selection of candidates graded according to despicability.
READ HERE
Orlando Reade’s new book What in Me is Dark is released this week. In the most recent issue, Orlando discusses derision, Milton’s Lucifer and the photos of Teju Cole, asking – what use is it to look at images of suffering?
SEE HERE
It takes two to tango in these intertwined images – shot by Melissa Schriek and styled by Simone Konu Rae.
