Scholar Defines Southern Fiction by Dead Mules

What’s the best test of whether a piece of fiction is truly Southern? Twangy speech? Sultry weather? A death in the family?

A dead mule, says Jerry Mills.

“A dead mule is something you can’t ignore,” he said. “It makes its way metaphorically and has to make a point.”

The former University of North Carolina professor has dug up more than 200 dead mules from short stories, novels and poems by such authors as William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Clyde Edgerton and Doris Betts.

Mills said mules are ubiquitous in Southern fiction because the mule was the work animal on nearly every farm earlier in this century.

Over 31 years, his mule theory spawned a literary magazine in North Carolina and a bar in Chapel Hill, the Dead Mule Club, where the fireplace is decorated with a mule skull and the bar sells mule T-shirts and caps.

In a recent issue of the Southern Literary Journal, he published the article “Equine Gothic: The Dead Mule as Generic Signifier in Southern Literature of the Twentieth Century.”

Mills catalogs the appearances of dead mules and describes how they came to be that way: overwork, asphyxiation, drowning, beating, gunshot, train collisions, even decapitation by an opera singer.

His dead mule king is novelist Cormac McCarthy, in whose “Blood Meridian” 59 specific mules are killed and dozens of other mules die in a plunge off a cliff.

In Mills’ favorite dead-mule story, from Truman Capote’s “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” a mule named John Brown is found hanging from a chandelier in a dilapidated antebellum mansion, a spittoon tied to its leg.

“It’s quite a scene--like something out of ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show,’ ” Mills said.

In his Southern Literary Journal piece, he wrote: “My own browsing in the area is at an end, and I am ready to leave the field to another, more coltish generation of critics and scholars. To do otherwise would resemble beating a dead--well, we all know what I mean.”