Southern Hemisphere Gothic
I’ve coined a new term. Southern Hemisphere Gothic.
Coming up new genres now? Shit. Clearly my head’s getting a wee bit inflated. But I’m not making a claim to have outright invented something here. I’m just putting words to a thing I’ve observed out in the world which, as far as I can tell hasn’t found an adequate label yet.
That didn’t make it sound any less arrogant, but that’s kind of what this writing thing is about: putting new words to things that are readily observable to everyone.
Anyway, as my style develops I’m finding my work increasingly echoing the southern gothic tradition. Not goth in the sense of eye make up and hating the sun, but rather decaying romanticism, existential cracks in rural settings, myth lightly darting in and out of the foreground.
If that hasn’t put a finger on it, I think these two Australians do a great job of capturing the essence of this deeply American genre.
Without levelling any claims of stylistic virtuosity, butchered shades of Faulkner and McCarthy keep finding their way into my newer stories.
Rural landscapes, etched in myth and deeper existential implications.
Haunted characters living down the generations that threw them into this reality.
While I used Nick Cave as a tongue-in-cheek example of someone who heavily lifts the tropes of this tradition, there is an interesting wrinkle to his Australianness that speaks to my point of an absence of terminology.
Like the Greek poets back in the day who supposedly had no name for the colour blue and therefore described the sea as “wine dark” and mused about “bronze skies,” Nick Cave didn’t grow up down in the bayou, he didn’t get whipped by the evangelical lashings of the bible belt. But the aesthetic spoke to him and he used the not-quite-right ingredients of his world to create the next-best version of that feeling. This resulted in a beautifully Frankenstein iteration of this school of music which is very apt for the tradition and built a new version of it atop its pre-established shoulders. It’s reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel America, which follows characters immigrating to America—a place the Czech writer had never been, therefore resulting in a surreal, imagined version of what that journey might be like.
What I’ve been doing isn’t the same as either of these examples though. I’m not writing American characters, I’m not reaching for a hyper-real version of the rural south. Yes I am doing similar things to Nick Cave in lifting an aesthetic, in blending myth with reality, but it’s not quite that. It’s different. It’s more—-
How do I put it? It’s more personal. It’s got different kinds of—-
It has less—
See?
Until a particularized term is invented, you have no choice but to talk around the thing. To be imprecise in your descriptions. To be overly wordy, and still fail to get your explanation quite right. To take the next best thing.
Murder Ballads, death in isolation, outlaw lore. I’m channelling many of the same things Flannery O’Connor explored. But with my work there’s a difference.
It’s the south, but not southern America. There are fields, but there’s no cotton in sight. Hills, creeks, bush and mountains colour my backdrops. What I do isn’t strictly pastoral though. It takes from the American tradition. There’s a flavour of that style, that not-quite-ghost-story ambience that infuses the southern landscapes with their characterizing aura.
There’s less of the bible in my world. But no less myth. No less lore.
It’s different. Because the past is different where I’m from. The land is different. The animals. The people are different. Yet at the same time, the people are no different.
Southern Hemisphere Gothic isn’t an original concept in practice. Tim Winton would probably fit the mould with his work. But it’s framing opens doors. Opens opportunities for a familiar world to be interpreted through the lens of a well worn tradition.
It’s born from a mind that has witnessed your thing and decided, “I like that.” But in the recreation, having no choice but to stamp it with my own fingerprint. It’s the Rolling Stones making black music with British accents. Keith Richards attempting to replicate the sound of a horn sound on guitar and coming up with the riff for Satisfaction.
It’s wrong. But it’s not. It’s tapping into a genius that the mind isn’t capable of. Your tradition leaking into their tradition and creating a new tradition.
So take it, use it. This is hardly mine, but you’re welcome all the same.