Southern Neogothic: Trash and Terror in William Gay's Twilight and Poppy Z. Brite's Exquisite Corpse

Abstract

Southern Neogothic:Trash and Terror in William Gay's Twilight and Poppy Z. Brite's Exquisite Corpse Lee Rozelle It is true this world holds mysteries you do not want to know. Visions that would steal the very light from your eyes and leave them sightless. —William Gay, Twilight 164 Horror is the badge of humanity, worn proudly, self-righteously, and often falsely. How many of you have lingered over a rendering of my exploits or similar ones, lovingly detailed in its dismemberments, thinly veiled with moral indignation? How many of you have risked a glance at some wretched soul bleeding his life out on a highway shoulder? How many have slowed down for a better look? —Poppy Z. Brite, Exquisite Corpse 158 The US South remains a common garbage dump for the American literary landscape, a popular place to drop off the nation's psychological, ecological, and human trash. Teresa Goddu explains in Gothic America that the South's "oppositional image—its gothic excesses and social transgressions—has served as the nation's safety valve: as the repository for everything the nation is not"; by "closely associating the gothic with the South, the American literary tradition neutralizes the gothic's threat to national identity" (76). The argument made in Goddu's oft-cited maxim is that if we can gothicize the South—make it the national literary backwoods where the abject materials and people are kept—then the nation might still see itself as a beacon of reason and democratic ideals. For Goddu, the US needs the Southern Gothic to provide this oppositional identity, a place to project the nation's more bestial side; as a result, to quote Allison Graham, it "continues to function as a repository of national repressions, as the benighted area 'down there' whose exposure to the light is unfailingly horrifying and thrilling" (349). As the "'dark' underbelly of the nation" and "the reversed image in the mass-media mirror," Graham argues, the South "was and [End Page 331] is America's repellent yet all too compelling Other" (335). From this perspective, the so-called dirty South serves as an imaginative landfill where American culture can abandon such troubles as harsh anti-immigrant policies, military waste, illiteracy, climate denial, water pollution, police brutality, and even potholes. No matter how bad things get, according to this logic, there's some consolation that it must be far worse down in that "bottomless pit of national ills" (Bjerre and Zawadka 3) below the Mason-Dixon line. Alternately rejecting and inflating such projections, Southern Gothic literature changed significantly in the era of Vietnam, the struggle for civil rights, and the growing recognition of ecological limits. As the region became more globalized and urban, works ranging from Cormac McCarthy's Suttree to Julia Elliot's The New and Improved Romie Futch reflected anxieties about its ecological future and the precarious link between modern advancement and social progress. Another muchused trope in the genre, the decay of natural landscapes, got caught up during this period in the national discussion of industrial pollution in the wake of such events as Love Canal and Three Mile Island. What began to emerge around 1970—the year of Deliverance and the first Earth Day—was a "Southern Neogothic" mode of writing that employs familiar elements of the Southern Gothic genre such as disability, spatial decay, poverty, and the grotesque to interrogate both neoconservative desires to "restore a sense of moral purpose . . that will form the stable center of the body politic" (Harvey 59) and neoliberal delusions of capital accumulation for business interests as "the only way to eradicate poverty and to deliver . . . higher living standards to the mass of the population" (25).1 Within a Southern Neogothic frame, grotesque human bodies not unlike those characterized in Faulkner, O'Connor, and Caldwell not only become embodiments of poverty and isolation but also give shape to such issues as environmental racism, industrial clear-cutting, trickle-down economics, and watershed toxicity. Southern Neogothic differs from Southern Gothic in other important ways. If the demons in Faulkner's and O'Connor's works tend to be psychological, Neogothicism's evil spirits are political, digital, and spatial...