The New South aesthetic is farcical, but not irredeemably so.
Over pimento cheese fritters with bacon jam at a restaurant in South Georgia, I marveled at waiters in chambray shirts under plaid vests, distressed brick walls, and cocktail names like ‘rockin porch’. How, I wondered, had things down there come to such a pass? My companion, a Virginian who’d gone to a New England college, lightly objected to the rusty scythes and plows adorning the walls – wasn’t this a bit much?
The farm tools were almost a New South parody, the chiks comin’ home to roost. To the Georgian, it seems, the logic was something like, the South is trendy – let’s decorate it Southern. So someone’s dilapidated shed offers up its long-dormant farm tools, repurposed for décor. What was annoying about it? To the non-native, it was trying way too hard, unintentionally subverting the dream in almost as crass a way as Old Virginny’s newest Charlottesville retailer, “Country Club Prep” (get your Southern Tide brand tees here). The strange thing is, in this restaurant’s case, the naïveté was a sign of authenticity; the Southern revival look couldn’t flourish because, well, there wasn’t much to revive. This overdone, heavy-handed restaurant was the most genuine ‘new South’ thing I’ve seen, because the newness never quite made sense to the furnishers.
In a Paris Review interview, the late Louisiana novelist Walker Percy said that the great tradition of Southern literature comes not, as may be supposed “from the famous storytelling gregariousness one hears about, but from the shy, sly young woman, say, who watches, listens, gets a fill of it, and slips off to do a number on it.” Another example of misconception: I lived in a beautiful apartment one summer with hundred year-old heart pine floors. A roommate’s contractor father came in and scourged our pride in the place: “I’d tear that right up and lay down some linoleum.” That’s something closer to where the South – in which, I’m aware, generalizations are the capital sin – might actually be. But the vision people want (in the various Southern revivals in LA, New York, etc) is more like:
Delta Mama and a Nickajack Man
Raised their Cumberland daughter in a Tennessee band
Played Springwater Station Inn
Couldn’t play fast, couldn’t fit in
Not that there’s anything wrong with Shovels & Rope (debatable: after the first song at a Charlottesville concert, Cary Ann takes the mike: ‘Can I get a yeeee-haw!?’ – this’ll be the last you ever SEEE of me), but it just shows what popular taste is right now. ‘Authentically’ Southern music, if there is such a thing, probably looks more like Phosphorescent, some weird dude wearing a cowboy getup and emphasizing irony, detachment, estrangement-in-the-world and self-conflictedness. For the SnR brand of Southern, there’s none of the mourning of the past’s passing, and there’s none of the repentance for its history. Its history, of course, played out with the ambiguity of a Shakespearian tragedy: a defeat caused a Fall and an exile (victims), but that Fall was facilitated not merely by fate; the defeat was both facilitated by a tragic flaw (or flaws) and provided an occasion for such a flaw (be it racism, inward-looking-ness, or hubris – all intertwined) to reach the pitch of self-destruction. Weren’t things great when Othello was furthering the Venetian cause? Sort of, maybe, but that’s not where we live. An unreflective and unambiguous reach back to Eden is the ultimate betrayal of where we live now; which is why musicians like Phosphorescent (or novelists like Percy) exhibit almost-painful levels of reflection and ambiguity.
But what is it we’re looking for in those ubiquitous mason jars, y’all? In the pages of Garden & Gun (get your authentichandcrafted hammer for $130 here)? Why were the Connecticut kids playing Wagon Wheel every other night in college (while the Southerners were after Umphrey’s, man)? The easiest answer would be a simpler, more rural time, with its vision of close community, lack of ambition, and what a Southern lit person might call particularity, that is, concreteness and context and non-fungibility. All are converses of so much of what ails us, now. But to go a bit deeper, I like Umberto Eco on the topic (in the context of unreflective Europhilia):
[T]he frantic desire for the Almost Real arises only as a neurotic reaction to the vacuum of memories; the Absolute Fake is offspring of the unhappy awareness of a present without depth.
There is also something of the exotic about the New South thing, a sort of tourism involved, as we try on new hats, act a part. Like going to Disneyworld (Eco mentions this) and sailing through the pirates’ cave (shiver me timbers, y’all) to get the piratical experience. Why is it that a New York restaurant in the shape of a ship, with menu references to scurvy and waiters in pirate hats and a band called the Lost Cove Mateys playing that night – why is that would be panned by the tasteful, but a similarly pandering Southern restaurant might not be? Some advice for such a restaurant:
1. Yes to mason jars, no to rusty tools (can’t be too noticeably direct, or the latent cheesiness comes out).
2. Southern Agrarian, not Western Agrarian (the West is already cliché), and
3. No references to the American South’s commercialization or urbanization.
All of this is really just a lens into tourism and human adventurism as a whole; the entire trend is one (too) cheesy movie or one (too) cheesy album away from going out of vogue. The insights to be gathered, from where I’m sitting, are that we want to explore other times and places and cultures, packaged without being noticeably so, authentic without visibly trying to be, accessible and purchasable without being commodified, and on the whole pleasant. But packaging, tryhard-ism, and commodification are facts of life: the Whiskey Still would be more authentically New Yorker than Southern, and for those after a truly Southern experience, I suggest the Red Lobster in Huntsville, Alabama.
This may sound dour or deflating, but perhaps a certain amount of insularity/snobbery is required to be appalled at the thought of the Dothan Red Lobster as the most authentically Southern. As Eco pans the imitation Europeanism of the West Coast (Madonna Hotel, etc), he praises the New York Federal Reserve’s Palazzo Strozi knockoff, which imitates Europe in the ugliest manner:
Built in 1924 of “Indiana limestone and Ohio sandstone”, it ceases its Renaissance imitation at the third floor, rightly, and continues with eight more stories of its own invention, then displays Guelph battlements, then continues as skyscraper. But there is nothing to object to here, because lower Manhattan is a masterpiece of living architecture, crooked like the lower line of Cowboy Kate’s teeth… real cities redeem, in their context, even what is architectonically ugly… In fact, a good urban context and the history it represents teach, with a sense of humor, even kitsch how to live, and thus exorcise it.
This idea seems right, even an ideal. Not an unreflective homage to a long-dated culture, not one which ignores guilt or Fall or change, but something living, and thus not capturable or experiencable in a tourist way. What makes something authentic is its foibles, and especially the foible of inauthenticity or aesthetic failure, e.g. the Fed’s Palazzo. If Red Lobster’s too much, check out that South Georgia restaurant with its plaid vests and farm tools. If the real Real is unreachable, at least a recognizable fake is something we can really relate to. Our tools of culture creation are weak and unwieldy, and though we can’t manufacture the real, we can at least celebrate, like Eco, the silliness of our constructions:
Making something out of nothing with a scratch and a hope
With two old guitars like a shovel and a rope
Despite the fact that, to my knowledge, a shovel and a rope have never been used to make anything, at least when all the real somethings have been deconstructed, we can enjoy the illusions, riding through Disney’s Pirate Cave in our second naivetes. It’s nothing if not fun, but hopefully, once we come out of the cave, we can look back at the shadows on its walls, indulge ourselves I the drama, and then step back into daylight for a dinner at the Red Lobster. The New South may be melting in the dark, but the vision of it is, like MacArthur Park, just ridiculous enough to have fun with. Next time Cary Ann asks for a yee-haw, y’all, I’ll probably still be too self-conscious to reciprocate – but I think the show’ll still be pretty fun.
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5 responses to “500 Miles from Bir-ming-ham: Umberto Eco and the New South”
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I’ve been mildly annoyed by this for a while, but could never fully articulate why. I was honestly surprised at how defensive I became of the South after I moved to New York. The gross generalizations of typical Southerners I would often hear were offensive at worst and patronizing at best. Seeing hip “Southern” restaurants around the city would annoy me because I’d think, “So we’re dumb rednecks and yet they find a bastardized caricature of Southern culture appetizing.”
Thanks for writing this.
“…for those after a truly Southern experience, I suggest the Red Lobster in Huntsville, Alabama.”
So true.
Really enjoyed reading this post.
One Saturday a few years ago, bored, I road tripped down to the Pie Lab in Greensboro … an offshoot of Auburn’s Rural Architectural Studio with interiors made of sustainable materials and arranged to promote community and flexibility. It was filled with white hipster do-gooders wearing overalls, bright striped socks, funky eyewear and long hair. Two were excitingly planning a visit to a black church in Tuscaloosa the next day with their new local friend of color. I remember thinking they’d get hazed at the feed store next door with their agrarian look. After buying a pie, I went to Mustang Oil to get a smoked chicken (all for dinner guests, mind you, I wasn’t on some eating binge). It was filled with average townies in Family Reunion or Southern Academy Football t-shirts. Everyone was headed down to the river after eating at the Formica tables in the dining room serviced by a rattling window unit. It was truly a tale of two cities. Ironically, Garden and Gun, the Soul of the South, has only featured one of those locations in its glossy mag… guess which one. Thanks Will you articulated a pet peeve of mine.
Great stuff, Will. I sometimes wonder whether the caricature of Southernism so widespread nowadays doesn’t serve as a kind of court jester to the rest of the nation, with Duck Dynasty being a prime example. “Hey aren’t they crazy?” … That such an identity is seemingly embraced wholesale by the south today is to be somewhat expected by a marginalized group, but it still feels like a loss to this native southerner. Perhaps “Hershel” from the Walking Dead is itself a caricature of a southerner, but at least he is respected and admired.
Will, If I read you correctly, you are not decrying the stereotyping itself as much as you are pointing it out as a symptom of something larger: the need people feel to spend money to escape from a more serious existential reality. In the case of the South, maybe that means that people want to experience some form of southern history or culture without experiencing the burden of it (ht C.Vann Woodward)? Speaking as a native southerner who wasn’t particularly conscious of any such burden as a kid, I’d say that southern whites are as complicit in this escapism as anyone. We’re the main ones who tried to strip the South of the burden by mythologizing it the late 19th century at the same time that we were imposing Jim Crow state by state. We provided a good deal of the southern brand that the nation bought. Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon wrote national bestsellers, and generations of Americans came to believe the romanticized, white supremacist garbage embedded therein. My suspicion is that, Woodward notwithstanding, the real burden of southern history is and has always been more national than southerners or northerners care to see. Depravity and decline don’t stop at the border of Yoknapatawpha County, and I think that denial is as prevalent as Faulkner-esque introspection in the South as well as the rest of the nation. Northern whites tell themselves that racism is merely a southern problem, and for many of them the Civil War is not a major part of their consciousness. Southern whites, whether or not we are neo-Confederates, convince ourselves that we’ve “solved” the lion’s share of our race problems and that real depravity lies in the “secularist liberal” northeastern and Pacific states. Meanwhile, throughout the nation whites who have the money and the desire can observe or consume the latest faux southern trend as we have all of them: with a condescending attitude, with bemusement or with a hint of defensiveness. And African Americans nationwide remain all too aware of the national burden that people want to sweep under the rug. I’m not picking on whites; I am one. But the South seemed to be the subject at hand. Depravity comes in all colors, shapes, sizes, regions and nationalities. You seem to be the resident southernist over at Mbird central, and you are far more well read in southern literature than I. If you haven’t done so already, you really might want to take a look at Paul Theroux’s article Soul of the South in the July/August issue of Smithsonian.