Water Skis and Dirty Back Roads: Reorienting the Deep South

The “Deep” of the Deep South is not so much a place as an orientation. You know it relationally, either peering into murky depths there, or swimming in it here with your face to the sunlight above. I grew up in South Carolina, of midwestern parents, and I always wondered where the Deep South was. Usually I knew and felt it intimately—it’s South Carolina after all—but then again my place also never felt as Deep as, say, Alabama. Impossibly, the Deep South was here and there at the same time, but they were not contiguous. Deep depended on which way I turned to look.

Deep doesn’t have to be water; it can also be woods or jungle. This is what I think people sometimes mean when they use Deep South to imply a kind of brutal white tribalism. At its worst, that Deep South is an incestuous, cannibalistic throw-back tucked way out in the piney woods with barely a red clay road leading in—a place far removed from civilization, practically untouched by it. Or, at its best, the Deep of the Deep South is its delicious authenticity, the shrimp-’n-grits peculiarities that make it culturally unique. That Deep South lives somewhat defensively in lifestyle magazines and blogs. Keith Cartwright has recently offered another sense, not of mythic cultural purity but of heterogeneous connections and recurrences shared with the Caribbean across Deep Time. But in every case Deep is still a kind of unifying field; it is formed by the perspective you take to look at it.

In color theory, Deep is the intensity of a purely saturated hue. In philosophy, Deep might be the closest thing we’ll get to the truth. Similarly, in the depth model of psychoanalysis, Deep is where we find the most important and revealing parts of the unconscious—the naked intensities that sometimes erupt through the functioning individual’s civilized veneer. This is the Deep of the symptom and the closet, the hidden place of what many like to call the “true self.” In literary studies, thanks in no small part to Fredric Jameson’s arguments in The Political Unconscious, Deep is likewise where we find the supposedly truest meaning of a text. In Jameson’s mode of symptomatic reading, the interpreter must decode what lies on the textual surface, including its gaps, omissions, and elisions, to reveal what the text is “really about” underneath. As Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus write, “[w]hen symptomatic readers focus on elements present in the text, they construe them as symbolic of something latent or concealed; for example, a queer symptomatic reading might interpret the closet, or ghosts, as surface signs of the deep truth of a homosexuality that cannot be overtly depicted” (3, emphasis added). Standing in my own ambidirectional relation to the Deep South, I imagine another kind of queer reading, one that does not seek to fix the positions of surface and depth, and thus of authenticity and truth, but that pays more attention to how we look in the first place. Many critics have offered alternatives to Jameson’s model of reading, such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory of “reparative reading” (Touching Feeling 123–151), and other forms of “surface reading” such as those outlined by Best and Marcus. In similar fashion, I want a mode of reading that doesn’t have to dig its way across the Deep South unearthing closets, but instead foregrounds the Deep’s mobile and mirage-like relationship to orientation itself. This would not be a “deep orientation” that lets us see deeply, but an orientation drawn toward the turns and shifts we make when Deep pops up beside us, before us, behind us, or somewhere else.

A good place to begin reorienting ourselves to the Deep is Patricia Yaeger’s brilliant reading of the water skier in Ellen Douglas’s novel Can’t Quit You, Baby (1988).¹ In this vignette a beautiful young white woman is skiing on a lake but suddenly meets her gruesome end:

the rope breaks or she loses...