Let's talk southern gothic

agreed. but southern gothic by definition must take place in the south, no?

>never wrote anything like it again

???????????????????

I wouldn't say so. It's more about the themes dealt with, in the context of Southern culture, which can be transplanted anywhere. In Blood Meridian's case, this culture is moving westward. Southern Gothic isn't just "Gothic" stories set in the South, it has its own peculiarities.

I think that the main aspect of loss presented is that of the loss of a culture, or more exactly, a way of life that was largely in its death throes. You have a southern aristocratic culture that is largely derived from their noble ancestors from England. Even the mental decline presented in Southern Gothic is largely a metaphor for their way of thinking, in general, being attacked by the world closing in around them. You'd be hard pressed to find something in Southern Gothic, and Gothic literature in general, that isn't tied to loss in some way.

I'm working on writing a Victorian Gothic short story right now to practice a couple classical narrative techniques. Maybe i'll post it here later , if this thread is still up, and you guys are interested, of course.

Blood Meridian is anti-western.

ballad of the sad cafe is exactly that. a ballad. it's an overly dramatic opera set in a pathetic dying bar/cafe/thing.

the heart is a lonely hunter explores deep complex emotions and questions of identity and is just... better

It's a Gothic Western, which is inherently going to be an anti-Western. Arguably, it's a Southern Gothic-Western.

Southern is inherently a regional genre. the book doesn't take place in the South, I don't see where that fits into the equation

i'm not so sure loss is really it. to me it seems more like a question of coming to grips with the reality of the south's past. to me the driving dichotomy of southern gothic is the difference between the enlightened southerner (sometimes this is only the author) and those who refuse to do so.

to be more precise, southern gothic is about the knowledge of loss (o'connor's "christ-haunts" and faulkner's ghosts, the southerners who have experienced loss but can't understand how or why)

Like I said above, Southern culture moved westward across the U.S.. Western history might be seen as part of Southern history, given how many Southerners were part of westward migration. BM doesn't deal specifically with the Southern aristocracy or plantation culture or their decay, but I don't think Southern Gothic necessarily has to deal with those things.

i think another driving force of southern gothic is the thin veneer of civility. blood meridian is certainly grotesque and brutal but that brutality doesn't necessarily play against anything but the reader's own sensibilities. for me it misses too many hallmarks of southern gothic.

What about the Judge himself? On the outside he's basically a smooth-talking Southern gentleman lawyer, but inside he's a grotesque, domineering, pedophilic etc. psychopath. Captain White might be another example of this kind of thing.

not really, no. southern gothic must take place in the south. something can have aspects of southern gothic or be southern gothic in anything but name but that doesn't make it southern gothic.

the land, environment, surroundings... gives SG its lifeblood.

>southern culture moved westward

No it didn't. the West never held onto the fanatical christianity of the South, not even close - and like it or not god is the center of all southern culture. christianity pervades literally everything.

i see where you're coming from but i'd argue there must be a clash between civility/brutality. the judge pretends to be civil but is really brutal which isn't quite the same thing

>the Southern Agrarians/Southern Renaissance

Warren was one of them?

him/lytle/tate/ransom founded the movement at Vanderbilt, yeah. no one reads their stuff today aside from All The King's Men but imo warren's poetry is some of the most underread writing of the 20th century

Nice. Did you like All the King's Men?

i need to reread it but i remember REALLY liking it. warren's one of those who can pull off high lyricism without sacrificing character/plot, and it sent me on a "lyric novel" (is that a thing? it is now) hunt for a couple months.

plus it's like THE novel of us politics

>no one reads their stuff today

IDK. I read Dickey as the last Agrarian. (He wasn't a founding member but I think he picked up where they left off)

The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock was good.

>no one reads their stuff today aside from All The King's Men
Allen Tate's poem "Ode to the Confederate Dead" is worth a read

remember having a whole semester for this in freshman mississippi high school, id rather not.

I liked William Gay's short story collection, "I Hate to See the Evening Sun Go Down" and his novel "Provinces of Night"
Larry Brown also had a couple good Southern Gothic novels, "Joe" and "Father and Son"
Tom Franklin's novella "Poachers" is also a very compelling read.
Harry Crews had a couple good ones, "A Feast of Snakes" and "The Gypsy's Curse"

>Victorian Gothic is a lot better
What are your favorites

Corncobbers pls go.

i love William Gay too, but sometimes I think he's just a poor man's McCarthy. I haven't read ANY Crews/Brown yet... I'm not sure if you'd call Lewis Nordan SG but his story collection "Music of the Swamp" is one of my all time favs

>Victorian Gothic is a lot better

>mfw Faulkner revolutionized the novel
>mfw Flannery O'Connor/Hemingway redefined the short story
>mfw Cormac McCarthy
>mfw a bunch of backwoods hicks with typewriters overturned stodgy lit-rah-toore without really trying

>but sometimes I think he's just a poor man's McCarthy.
he obviously owes a lot to McCarthy. Provinces of Night is from a line from Child of God - "If there were darker provinces of night, he would have found them."
but he did have an ear for sentences and dialogue and he occasionally added something new to the mix like that Pakistani couple in The Paperhanger.

Is Breece Pancake considered Southern Gothic? Or is West Virginia something else entirely?

That's a good question. His region doesn't really have a literary movement, but it's gothic for sure

>being poor, having guns, and having fun makes you a bad person

I'd say so, yeah.
The Appalachians extend mainly in the mid-South, so fiction set there would be Southern Gothic just not conventional southern Gothic

YeCarthy isn't actually from the south. He just writes about it because it makes him seem more 'murrican.

>not from the south
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cormac_McCarthy#Personal_life

>father worked for the TVA
>lived and educated in Knoxville
>dropped out of the University of Tennessee
> "I moved to a shack with no heat and running water in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains outside of Knoxville"

lol

you do know that Suttree is semi-autobiographical, right?
He left home when he was young and lived in poverty

but wasn't West Virginia pro Union? Didn't they basically secede from Virginia and the Confederacy?

His family moved to the South when he was 4. Lived from 4 to his 40's in Tennessee then moved to Texas and later New Mexico.

kinda. Grant chased the Confederacy out of western Virginia in like 1861 (?) which freed the people living there to form their own pro-Union state, West Virginia. It's still considered part of the South though (which is weird considering how far north it is) but culture's a strange and wild thing.

Fuckin shit, Breece. Pity he shot himself. His stories are some of my favorites ever. "Trilobites" and "The Fox Hunters" alone blow 90% of the New Yorker out of the goddamn water.