783 Southern Imagining (with Elleke Boehmer) | My Last Book with John McMurtrie

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Southern Imagining (with Elleke Boehmer) | My Last Book with John McMurtrie"

The History of Literature – Episode 783, March 12, 2026
Host: Jacke Wilson
Guests: Elleke Boehmer (Professor of World Literature, University of Oxford) and John McMurtrie (Editor, "Literary Mapping: Fictional Travels across the World of Literature")

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Overview

In this episode, Jacke Wilson explores the powerful role of geographical identity in literature, focusing especially on how the Southern Hemisphere has been imagined, marginalized, or othered in global narratives. Professor Elleke Boehmer joins to discuss her new book, Southern: A Literary and Cultural History of the Far Southern Hemisphere, shedding light on how Southern lands—and their writers—navigate a world visually, culturally, and historically dominated by the North. The episode closes with John McMurtrie reflecting on his ideal "last book" to read, sparking thoughts on lifelong literary journeys.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining Identity in Literature and Geography

[01:09 – 04:46]

• Jacke reflects on his move from small-town Wisconsin to Chicago, discussing feelings of being an outsider and drawing analogies to the South vs. North dynamic globally.
• Literature, he says, is about "definitions and self-definitions… Characters develop. That verb suggests that they start somewhere and end up somewhere else. Those places are identity, but even deeper." (Jacke Wilson, 01:48)
• Raises the question: What happens when a whole region—like the Southern Hemisphere—is cast in the shadow of northern predominance?
• Sets the stage for Boehmer's investigation into "Southern imaginings" and the implications for literature and lived experience.

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2. Chekhov’s Philosophy and the Question of 'Heroes'

[04:47 – 15:05]

• Jacke shares an anecdote about Anton Chekhov defining happiness (linked to fishing) and compares his own sense of fleeting pride and insecurity to Chekhov’s melancholy.
• Chekhov’s take on art and truth:

  "What makes art so especially good is that there can be no lying in it… But an art that can't be done."
  (Chekhov, read by Jacke Wilson, 11:48–11:51)

• Chekhov on heroism:

  "What heroes are we? What heroes are we? We're not heroes."
  (Chekhov, as read by Jacke, 12:29)

• Prepares the listener for the “hex” of being ‘othered’ by cultural geography, tying literary self-doubt to broader existential positions.

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3. The Southern Hemisphere: Who, Where, and Why

[16:32 – 21:17]

• Elleke Boehmer introduces her new book and defines the “far Southern Hemisphere”:
  • Southern Africa (South Africa, Mozambique, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia)
  • Southern Cone of South America (Chile, Argentina)
  • Australia, New Zealand, and Pacific Islands below the equator
• Emphasizes the dominance of water ("81% is ocean") and sparse population (only 10% of humanity).

  “The Southern Hemisphere is largely water… such a very blue hemisphere and such an underpopulated one.”
  (Elleke Boehmer, 17:30)

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4. Living Faraway: Distance, Perspective, and “Cultural Cringe”

[19:17 – 27:16]

• Boehmer addresses southern sense of remoteness—both from ‘major world events’ (as covered in northern media) and from each other due to lack of direct transport and communication.

  “Most southern nations… have this sense of being not only very far away from where it all happens, but also from each other.”
  (Boehmer, 20:24)

• Jacke and Boehmer discuss "cultural cringe":

  “We are always secondary, always a little bit lesser... What really matters comes from far, far away...”
  (Boehmer, 25:54 – 25:59)

• This is reinforced institutionally—universities, sciences, libraries, etc. Historically, the South was mapped as “there be monsters” and imagined as empty or dangerous by northern knowledge-makers.

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5. The Southern Perspective Over Time

[27:16 – 30:00]

• Has “distance” changed in the internet age?
  • Boehmer: Though technology brings the world closer, feelings of being remote from the North persist, partly due to ongoing global power structures and histories of economic development.
  • Notably, even as flights and telecommunication networks have improved, direct south-south connections remain limited or have ceased.

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6. Ecological and Cultural Consequences

[30:19 – 33:12]

• The South is often treated as a wasteland: e.g., as a dumping ground for technology waste (Jacke notes Elon Musk's defunct satellites being dropped over the southern Indian Ocean—a story Boehmer supplies).
• Boehmer warns that ignoring the South endangers integrated global well-being.

  “If we look at our planet only from the vantage of the dominant northern hemisphere… we miss seeing the planet as an integrated organic whole.”
  (Boehmer, 32:05)

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7. Literary Solutions: Navigating through Southern Eyes

[34:37 – 41:12]

• Boehmer’s project: Help readers “pivot” perceptions—map the world from the South up and focus on connection through oceanic imagination.
• Highlights authors who achieved this:
  • Herman Melville: Portrayed the seas as a uniting medium in Moby Dick.
  • Joseph Conrad & Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Used navigation and displacement as major themes.

    “These writers… are, I suggest, navigational in the way they put across empathy.”
    (Boehmer, 36:56)

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8. Estrangement and Embrace: Literary Devices and Psychological Impact

[41:12 – 47:59]

• Southern Hemisphere literature doesn’t just “plunge us in,” but offers “a compass for global reading.”
• Outsiderness as perspective:
  • D.H. Lawrence’s sense of feeling "all upside down” in the South—sun in the wrong part of the sky, seasons reversed.
  • Captain James Cook as an example of processing cognitive dissonance through writing.
• Humility & Modesty:
  • Being overlooked can instill a certain modesty—but Boehmer cautions against it devolving into “cringe.”
  • Example: Patrick White (Australia’s Nobel laureate) continued to champion local causes rather than seeking global validation.

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9. Who is “Southern Imagining” For?

[47:59 – 50:18]

• Boehmer’s aims are double:
  • For Northerners: “Notice the South. Use the writing of the South to navigate your way there.”
  • For Southerners: “Embrace, hold your sense of distance... It's something we can draw on to think about the planet more holistically.”
• Environmental reminder: The Southern Ocean is warming faster than any other—reminding us the fate of the South affects the entire planet.

  “We forget about the far South at our peril.”
  (Boehmer, 49:00)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Literature is always about definitions and self-definitions. It's often the plot of the book."
  (Jacke Wilson, 01:48)
• “What heroes are we? We're not heroes.”
  (Chekhov, via Jacke, 12:29)
• “The Southern Hemisphere is largely water… 81% is water and only 10% of the world's population lives there.”
  (Elleke Boehmer, 17:30)
• “Australians even have a word for this, the term for it: cultural cringe.”
  (Boehmer, 25:54)
• “This understanding became stronger… It really helps to look at the world from the southern hemisphere, from the coastline looking back inland, and from the oceans.”
  (Boehmer, 32:45)
• “Writers like Melville… take us in these great kind of almost geometric swoops around and across the continents and oceans.”
  (Boehmer, 38:25)
• “Yes, there is a particular kind of address to Northern readers, almost a wake up call… But I’m talking to Southerners, too.”
  (Boehmer, 48:27)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 01:09 — Jacke introduces the main theme: identity, perspective, and the North/South divide in literature
• 04:47 – 15:05 — Chekhov anecdote and reflections on humility, self-worth, and literary “hexes”
• 16:32 – 21:17 — Introduction to Elleke Boehmer & defining the Far Southern Hemisphere
• 19:17 – 27:16 — “Cultural cringe,” institutional bias, and Southern feelings of remoteness
• 27:16 – 30:00 — Changes and persistence of the sense of distance with globalization
• 30:19 – 33:12 — Ecological and cultural consequences of southern marginalization
• 34:37 – 41:12 — Literary navigation: Melville, Conrad, and using literature to reimagine connections
• 41:12 – 47:59 — Outsider perspectives in literature, humility, and local/global literary value
• 47:59 – 50:18 — Who the book is for and its global/ecological implications

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My Last Book: John McMurtrie’s Literary Finale

[50:34 – 53:38]

• John McMurtrie answers: What book would you want as your last?

  “I’m just going to come up with an obnoxious answer, which would be Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Because that way I can postpone the inevitable… But if it’s a painful way out, how about some Lydia Davis short and snappy one-page stories and go along with the morphine.”
  (John McMurtrie, 51:20–52:22)

• Jacke makes an insightful connection:

  “You’ve almost chosen two polar opposites. Although Lydia Davis translated Proust… Having both of those books… one on each nightstand, exactly what you needed, depending on where you were in that particular moment.”
  (Jacke Wilson, 52:28–53:11)

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Closing

A reflective, far-ranging conversation that connects the personal and the planetary, showing how literature offers maps not just of imagined lands but ways of being and seeing—especially for those “farthest away.”

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Further Topics Teased for Next Episodes: Marcus Aurelius, John Ruskin, Robert Frost, and more canonical authors.

Transcript

[Jack Wilson]

The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio.

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[Elica Bomer]

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[Jack Wilson]

Hey, new girl.

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Hey.

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[Podcast Host / Narrator]

We start today with an anecdote. After I graduated from high school, I

[Jack Wilson]

made a move from a small town

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

in Wisconsin to study in Chicago, a

[Jack Wilson]

city of millions of people, the biggest

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

city that I had ever been in. My attitude was, I can't believe you guys live here. This is insane. There's so much to do. You're so lucky to be in this enormous city. And yet Chicago called itself the Second City, knowing it was forever the runner up to New York. It wasn't the second City to me. It wasn't small or second best or

[Jack Wilson]

the Little Brother or anything like that.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

It took me a while to absorb this feeling of being in the Second City. But I eventually did, especially after I'd been to New York. It's strange to define yourself by where you live, but it's even stranger to define yourself or to feel that you're being defined by somewhere you don't live. And literature is always about definitions and self definitions. It's often the plot of the book. Who is this person and what does he or she become? Characters develop. That verb suggests that they start somewhere and end up somewhere else. Those places are identity, but even deeper. It's like going into computers and seeing the level beneath the software where the computer knows how to interpret the software. What is this called? Machine language? Maybe. I'm not sure at that. Anyway, at that hardware level of literature, there's identity. Every time an authority sits at a laptop or picks up a pen or fiddles with a stylus or clears his or her throat to rapt listeners sitting around the campfire, who am I to tell this story? A wise elder? A slick out of towner? A scholar? A mother? A priest? Identity means everything in literature, and literature in turn creates identity. So what happens when a whole region of people is placed in that position of Chicago? You live in a big city, but you feel like it's somehow small because it's not New York? Well, in this case, we're looking at the Southern hemisphere. What happens when the rest of the world takes for granted that the north is culturally predominant? The south is where things are far away or remote or strange? Do the people of the south read those books and think, yes, I am strange. But everything they know once they close the book is not strange, it's familiar. It might be all they know. Do they embrace the idea that they've been othered? Do they struggle against it? Is it a source of pride or defiance? Our guest today has looked at these Southern imaginings. She'll explain to us what she found. And Chekhov answers one of his critics, Leo Tolstoy. Then we'll hear my last book with an expert in literary journeys. That's all coming up today on the history of literature.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, here we go.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

The year was 1902, and Chekhov is talking with a rich acquaintance who later wrote up his memories of the visit. The two of them went fishing, which Chekhov described as a sort of quiet madness. You are happy with life, you are happy with yourself, and you are not a danger to anyone. That was his view of fishing. Oh, boy. Happy with life and happy with yourself. Guess what, people? That's not always the case when it comes to your old friend Jack Wilson. Oh, no. Let me tell you what it's like to be me. So I haven't been to the local library for a while, but I stopped in there the other day. I wandered into the aisle, the literary aisles, as I like to do, and I noticed a book by Marion Turner was turned out. We've had Marion Turner on the show a couple of times to talk of.

[Jack Wilson]

Wants to talk about the very book, the very.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

Oh, boy. Wants to talk about that very book, in fact, that I was looking at on the shelf now, her biography of the Wife of Bath. And when I say turned out, you know what I mean, right? The shelves are. There's a row of books where you only see the spines, and then there's one that's turned out, like at a bookstore. So you see the full front cover. And there it was, a book we had featured on this podcast. And Then I looked down the shelf below and there was Emma Smith, another one of our guests, who has also appeared on the podcast to discuss that very book. And then Jed Rasula was there.

[Jack Wilson]

We were three for three.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

The books that the library, the librarians at the library had chosen to turn out to face the public. The most enticing books out of that group, they had chosen as the top books from each of those three shelves, books that had been featured on the humble little podcast. I took a wider look. Eight shelves. Five of the books turned out were books and authors that we had discussed. I kind of couldn't believe it. We've covered a lot of ground here, and we've talked to a lot of wonderful people, but that was a pretty high percentage. I felt this surge of accomplishment, even pride. I thought, jack, you've done a good thing here with the podcast. And I even thought to myself, I literally had this thought. I thought, I'm going to feel good about myself today. I was looking forward. It was only the afternoon. I was looking forward to the rest of the day, the evening, where I would feel good about myself for once. Happy with life and happy with yourself and not a danger to anyone. Thank you, Chekhov. And so I texted my wife, Emma, who is the show's producer, to congratulate her as well. Look at how well we're doing. Here's a picture of the shelves. Look at these. Five for eight we are. And one of the shelves that we didn't hit on, one of the three that wasn't a book that we had on our show was ancient classics.

[Jack Wilson]

And so she texted back, oh, I'm

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

surprised they don't have Daniel Mendelsohn's translation of the Odyssey on there. We'd have gone six for eight. And I was on such a roll. This wasn't going to bother me, right? The idea that we should have done better than 5 for 8. 5 for 8 is. Who knew we'd do that well? So I was on such a roll that I texted back, well, that's no doubt because the book has been checked out by a history of literature podcast listener. Lol. We win again. But then, then that's when it hit me. Why have there not been listeners checking out the books by Marion Turner and Jed Rasula and Emma Smith? Why are those still here? What did I do wrong to poison the well against these guests? I've tainted their books. I wasn't 5 for 8 in a positive sense. It was evidence that I put some kind of hex on these five. But these are great books. The librarians are doing everything to get people to read them, and nobody's picking them. It must be me. It must be the History of Literature podcast Hex. And so my great day of being happy with life and happy with myself and not a danger to anyone. Well, that great day, I guess I had a great minute, a great 90 seconds or so. I need to get back to fishing. But guess what? That's why I love Chekhov. Not because he found fishing where that he felt so good, but the idea that the rest of the time he didn't fish a whole lot people. The rest of the time he was down there with me feeling lousy. You could tell when he says fishing is good because you feel happy with life and happy with yourself and not a danger to anyone. That tells you that when he's not fishing, the temptation or the tendency is to be unhappy with life, unhappy with yourself, and a danger threat. Okay, I do need to get back to fishing. But first I need to get back to Chekhov and his story, where we started this whole thing. Another little story that this acquaintance, his name was. Who was the acquaintance? Alexander Tikonov. That's the rich acquaintance who wrote the memoirs.

[Jack Wilson]

And another story that he tells about

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

Chekhov is that Chekhov caught a fish and handed it to a small dog who devoured it in one bite, this raw fish. And Chekhov said, look, that dog behaves exactly like our literary critics. Well, another one of those critics was Tolstoy. He loved Chekov, but he criticized him as well. So we're going to hear a longer passage now from Tikhonov's Memory memoirs. This is Chekhov at age 42, recorded by a friend who's describing something Chekhov is saying, says, quote, you yourself aren't writing? No.

[Jack Wilson]

Well, that's good. But today's students, instead of studying, are

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

either writing novels or making revolution. Yet he objected to himself. Maybe that's actually better. As students, we drank beer and neglected our studies too. And now we've turned into such old duffers. Another time.

[Jack Wilson]

This is how it was before all else.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

My friends, there's no need to lie.

[Jack Wilson]

What makes art so especially good is

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

that there can be no lying in it. It's possible to lie in love, in politics, in medicine, it's possible to deceive people. And the Lord God himself, such things have happened. But an art that can't be done. Chekhov was silent a moment, as if waiting for objections from his unseen interlocutor, and having waited in vain, continued. Yet I'm often reproached. Even Tolstoy reproached me for. For writing about trivialities. For having no positive heroes. Revolutionaries, Alexander the Great, or even simply honest police officers. But where to take them from? I would be glad to. He laughed mournfully. Our life is provincial. The towns are unpaved, the villages impoverished, the people threadbare. In our youth we all chirp exuberantly like sparrows on manure. But by 40, we're already old and starting to think about death. What heroes are we? What heroes are we? We're not heroes. It's no wonder I love Chekhov so much. I had that flashing moment, that surge at the library when those books were turn out. Look at all this work I've done. It's paid off. I was chirping exuberantly like a sparrow on manure. What an image. But that's not me. That's not the world. Maybe when I was young, but now I'm an old duffer. Old and thinking about death. What heroes are we? What heroes are we? That phrase has been haunting me ever since I read it in the book. It was edited by. Well, maybe I shouldn't say it was edited by. Maybe I should save the author from the hex. I can't help myself. The book was edited by Bob Blaisdell and it's called Chekov on Writing. Now let's hear from another writer dealing with a hex of a different kind. The hex of living in a world that's tilted north. What does that do to the south to be treated and the southerners to be treated like the inhabitants of the faraway land? We'll have Elica Bomer to tell us about that after this. Hey, Perdompor interum pirtu playlist

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[Jack Wilson]

Okay. Joining me now is Elica Bomer, who is professor of World Literature and English at the University of Oxford. Her previous works include academic studies like colonial and post colonial literature, migrant metaphors and works of fiction, including her novel

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

the Shouting in the Dark.

[Jack Wilson]

She's here today to discuss her new book, Southern A Literary and Cultural History

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

of the Far Southern Hemisphere. Elica Bomer, welcome to the History of Literature.

[Elica Bomer]

Thank you. It's great to be here and to be in conversation.

[Jack Wilson]

So I found this to be a fascinating idea for a book. And then it occurred to me that maybe that's because I come from the Northern Hemisphere and if I was from the Southern hemisphere, instead of fascinating, I'd use an adjective like essential or say, it's about time we had a book like this. So, I mean, let's talk about the title. First of all, the Far Southern Hemisphere. Which countries does that cover?

[Elica Bomer]

The far Southern Hemisphere is really the far edge of the world. And in terms of geopolitics, it includes the countries of Southern Africa, South Africa, Mozambique, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Namibia, the Southern cone of South America, so Chile and Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, and then some of the Pacific islands that lie below the equator. The fascinating thing, though, to agree with your perception of fascinating is that the Southern Hemisphere is largely water. It's largely ocean, 81% is water, and only 10% of the world's population lives there. This blew my mind when I began on this book that we're dealing with such a very blue hemisphere and such a such an underpopulated one.

[Jack Wilson]

Well, that's interesting because it starts to get at some of the tricky things about this conversation, which is are there things, tangible things that we can say impact the way the people are as opposed to just the way they seem to be from people who are coming from a different point of view? So, for example, does the omnipresence of the ocean change the way people think and see the world and so on, or is that just something that people would assume to be the case because they come from a world that doesn't have, you know, such a high density of ocean and such a low density of population? Is this the kind of question you had to wrestle with when you were coming up with the ideas and the arguments that you were going to make in your book?

[Elica Bomer]

Yes, it's that sense of distance and separation and that sense of being in or coming from the places where. And I'm sort of raking the air with my fingers here, you know, scare quotes where nothing particularly seems to happen. I was really struck around New Year when there were in the papers and in media lots of reviews of the first quarter of the. Of the 21st century that we're in, which had just come to an end at the end of 2025. And several of these media outlets kind of summarized those 25 years with kind of 25 major events or 25 remarkable photographs. And from at least two of these, perhaps more, it struck me that not a single world event from the past 25 years in the terms of these northern media outlets had happened in the Southern Hemisphere. Sometimes events like volcanic eruptions or terrible air crashes unfortunately do happen in the Southern Hemisphere. They do get reported in the Northern Hemisphere. But then the rest of the world kind of forgets about the hemisphere again. So it's that sense that I think most Southern nations, peoples, cultures have of being not only very far away from where it all happens, but also very far away from each other. There aren't actually many channels of communication or transportation between the southern continents.

[Jack Wilson]

Let's talk a little bit about the scope of your examination of this. It runs all the way up to the present. But when does your story begin? How many centuries ago do you first start to detect this phenomenon?

[Elica Bomer]

Well, really, it begins millennia ago. And in terms of modern history, I start with the Portuguese explorers to Southern Africa and South America in the 1400s. But I go far further back than that because what I try to say in the book is that in order to understand the world, the planet Earth, in a more organic way from the south, we need to tune into some of the myths and legends, the myth traditions of southern cultures. And for that, we need to go right back to some of the myths, you know, the dreamings that, for example, Indigenous Australians and indigenous Tierra del Fuegans had of where they stood on the planet and how they read the starry skies and how they navigated the seas around them. So we go in the first chapter, and in the second, last chapter, we go right back to those mythic understandings. And then we kind of accelerate to modern history. So 1500 to the present day.

[Jack Wilson]

And how much in the modern history is the southern conception of themselves influenced by these northern perspectives? I think you say the phrase I jotted down here was northern perspectives are institutionally embedded. What are some of these northern views of the Southern Hemisphere? And what kinds of institutions are we talking about? We already had one example of the idea that kind of nothing happens in the south. And we kind of see that through the media or newspapers and what they

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

choose to cover and what they choose

[Jack Wilson]

to remember and focus on and so on. But what other institutions kind of contain this northern point of view?

[Elica Bomer]

Well, pretty much most institutions that we may want to mention, but for the purposes here, for this discussion, the knowledge gathering and knowledge making institutions of universities of science, libraries, for which all of the above, for which the Southern Hemisphere has always been the place of there be monsters. You know, there was that belief, of course, until, you know, Galileo and Copernicus came along. There was that belief that the far away, in what was understood to be, you know, the far edge of the world, you know, there was nothing. You'd kind of. You'd fall off the edge. And some of those images continue into writing in. Even in the 1800s and in the 1900s. So if you think of the adventure writing of Jules Verne, your Journey to the ends of the Earth, that is a journey into the Southern Hemisphere. That's a journey to the South Pole and beyond, which is imagined as a great big steaming cascade.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

Mm.

[Jack Wilson]

Now, I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin, and, you know, I was living the life that I was living, but I would often read these books where there would be kids growing up in New York City, and they would talk about, you know, getting mugged, or they would talk about stopping by the diner and all these things that I didn't have, in addition to, you

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

know, the big parks or the zoo

[Jack Wilson]

or the, you know, taking the train and, you know, all these different things. But I kind of. So I kind of lived this transposed life. I sort of had a layer of New York City on top of what I was living. And it did give me this feeling of, you know, what I. Obviously what I had around me wasn't unusual to me, but I did have a feeling that maybe it would be unusual to other people and that other kids my age were living a life that would have a lot of things that I didn't have access to. Is that kind of what it's like, do you think? For people in the Southern Hemisphere, they are inundated with reports or novels or television shows and so on. That's kind of just taking for granted an American or European point of view. And so they know that that's not what they are living, but they also know that not everybody understands that distinction.

[Elica Bomer]

Yeah, I really love that memory that you just Shared. That is very much the kind of perception, the kind of mindset that I'm tuning into with this book. But if you, like, writ large, you know, kind of magnified, so that literally everything that is important, that is seen as important, that is seen as historically significant, that is seen as scientifically crucial, comes from not only elsewhere, kind of like the big city, but very, very far away. And the Australians even have a word for this, the term for it, cultural cringe, which is this idea of, you know, we are always secondary, we are always a little bit lesser, a little bit less important. What really matters comes from far, far away, which tends to be the north, be that the United States, be that Europe, be that, say, China in the 20th century. So that cringe is, I think, something that I go into in the book that I analyze. And then I also think about ways of addressing it, ways of kind of thinking about it and going about it differently. How to recenter what is important right now?

[Jack Wilson]

I want to ask you about that too, but I have another question first, which is, because you're looking at such a sweep of time, have these perspectives changed? Because it seems like to feel like you're very far away would be very different in the age of sail versus

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

the age of the Internet.

[Jack Wilson]

Do you see a difference in that feeling? Or does it persist even as the world has. Has shrank?

[Elica Bomer]

Yeah, I think it has. That perception of being very, very far away has changed over time. But what has been interesting to me in writing the book is that even though it has changed and the world has through the Internet and actually about a century and a bit ago, you know, the telegraph tended to get messages around the world in about three minutes flat, which is pretty impressive.

[Jack Wilson]

Then air travel.

[Elica Bomer]

Air travel, of course, and in the heyday of, you know, Boeing travel in the 1970s, there were actually kind of crossroots and sort of south, south, say, between, you know, Brazil and Southern Africa and Southern Africa and Australia and Australia and Chile. So, you know, there were. There were those connections. They have ceased to exist now, which is interesting too, considering that kind of shrunk planet that you were talking about. But the feeling has persisted. And the reason why it has persisted is, of course, because if you think of that great land bridge, we're thinking sort of geopolitics again here. The great land bridge of Eurasia across the Bering Strait to North America. That does tend to be where a lot of scientific discoveries have taken place, a lot of economic development has taken place, capitalist development, which is kind of the motor of world history. So that sense of being very far away nonetheless, despite this shrinking, has definitely persisted. But to that I'd like to add a really important kind of sidebar footnote. And that is that of course to say terra del Fuegans or indigenous Australians or Maori people, Pacific Islanders, you know, kind of living their life in their space back, I don't know, say a thousand, two thousand and more years ago, of course, there wouldn't have been that sense of the North. Their worlds were holistic to themselves. So this cringe is something that is kind of almost actually, you know, exacerbated and accelerated in modern times.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. Because you're aware of how often you're ignored. If you are communicating with the north every single second of every single day, it might, it might be give you more instances of, well, here's people who forget about me in Australia yet again.

[Elica Bomer]

Exactly. And there's also that sense of certainly the southern oceans as a kind of wasteland, a kind of a place where our rubbish can be got rid of. This is an interesting little factoid. There's a daily flight that goes from Johannesburg to Sydney and from Sydney to Johannesburg and it kind of loops across Antarctica. It's the shortest route. But that southern part of the Indian Ocean which lies between those two continents is also where Elon Musk likes to dump his Starlink satellites when they've come to the end of their lives. And there was a complaint from Qantas to Starlink that the dumping of the satellites was endangering this flight. So it's just a kind of a small example or actually with quite potentially large repercussions of how those southern waters are simply used to get rid of waste.

[Jack Wilson]

Right, right. Let's take a break in a moment and then come back with some of the solutions and the way to address this. But first let's talk about some of these consequences. What do you see as the consequences of this divide? Has it led to tangible things like oppression and wars? Are we talking about a psychological impact that it's had or sort of cross cultural ignorance of one another? Or what do you see as the importance of this? Why is this an important phenomenon to identify and try to address?

[Elica Bomer]

Well, that's the million dollar question. And I do think it is an important issue to address because actually, I think if we look at our planet only from the vantage of the dominant northern hemisphere, I think what we miss is to see the planet as a kind of integrated organic whole without wastelands where nuclear testing can be carried out without apparently harming people and without using the southern oceans as a place to, to simply to get rid of our waste. What we need to do is to think of the planet holistically. And I think for that to get there, it really helps. This understanding became stronger and stronger the longer I worked on the book. It really helps to look at the world from the southern hemisphere, to look at the world also from, if you like, from the coastline looking back inland, and also from the vantage point of the oceans.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, let's take a quick break and come back with more from Elica Bomer.

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[Jack Wilson]

Okay, we're back. So, Elica, you put your finger on one of our potential solutions here just before the break. How does your book try to reimagine the world from a south centered map? What does that do to the way we typically view the world?

[Elica Bomer]

What I hope I'm doing with the book is to, to just kind of pivot our perceptions to the south. And I do this, I should say, through reading certain really kind of big books that kind of get this idea of southern imagining. So to pivot the world to the south and so see the world in this more integrated, organic way where everything is connected with everything else across oceans. In the Northern Hemisphere, most countries actually have several borders with other countries in the Southern hemisphere that is less so because the continents are so separated, the one from the other countries will have a few borders, but then the rest is ocean. So what I'm trying to do is to say, well, actually the ocean connects us to the great Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick. He completely got this. He talks about the seas as a great integrating, you know, interconnecting medium. And he kind of takes the whole, that whole huge novel to kind of convince us of this. But I think he sort of does so brilliantly, even within the first 50 pages. So it's that understanding of the world not only as dominated by the north, but also from the south and these waters as being so important to kind of sustain the life and the well being of us.

[Jack Wilson]

All right, speaking of literature and speaking of Melville, because this is the history of literature. How has literature done on this? We tend to think of authors and great literature as being all about empathy and all about seeing things, putting yourself in someone else's shoes and so on. Do they tend to be better than some of these other institutions? Or do you see a lot of the same northern perspectives and biases kind of reinforced by literature?

[Elica Bomer]

Well, yes, perspectives and biases are reinforced. But the really important thing, and I mean, it's not all writers, but it's some very special writers, including Melville and Joseph Conrad actually too, there are some writers who are, I suggest, navigational in the way they understand or they kind of put across that empathy or that invitation to empathy. So there's something in their work. And this, actually, this pertains also to diarists, to memoirists and to poets. It's there in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's incredible ballad poem, the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. There's something about plotting our way towards each other and how we do that, so how we navigate not just person to person, but also within the space that we're in. So these writers, Melville, Conrad, Coleridge, and then also a whole range of 20th century writers, they understand space in this kind of holistic 3D way. And, you know, you see this in these amazing passages in some of Conrad, of the Children of the Sea, for example, where he takes us on a journey because, you know, he's a shipboard writer, he was himself a mariner. He kind of gives us this full empathetic impression of being on a ship turning round the Cape of Good Hope. And Coleridge does something very similar. He kind of, he spins us round Cape Horn, South America. It's very navigational, the poem. So at one point it goes, you know, the sun rose up upon the left, out of the sea came he. And then as crisis happens and the encounter with the albatross and the, you know, the mariner does a. Does the very bad thing of killing the albatross here at the far end of the world. He commits this act of sacrilege against nature. Then he comes round and through the experience, and then the poem goes. The sun rose up upon the right, out of the sea came he, so he has kind of, you know, Coleridge and Kohler, they kind of take us in these great kind of almost geometric swoops around and across the continents and the oceans.

[Jack Wilson]

And so what do we take from that? Is that in terms of your project? Would that help us to understand what it means or to be comfortable with the idea that we could be in the north looking toward the south, or we could just as easily imagine ourselves in the position of being in the south looking at the north?

[Elica Bomer]

Yes, it's that, I mean, that is the crucial question. So I think these works of literature kind of take us into that feeling of estrangement. It's almost a feeling of enchantment. It's a feeling of being displaced out of your comfort zone, but kind of nonetheless having a means of, of, of, of navigating your way through very, very differently. D.H. lawrence in the early 20th century, he makes this great voyage. You know, he was not well and he was trying to get his health back. And he makes this great journey from what was on now, Sri Lanka, through Australia and across to California. And he talks about the, you know, he's literally all upside down. The sun is in the wrong part of the sky, the water turns weirdly down, the plug hole. He talks about these kind of gashes in the atmosphere. Like, you know, things just aren't kind of matching up. He's not putting it all together. But through writing and then us through coming after him and through reading of his experiences, he's able to understand his feelings of self estrangement better and get to a more comfortable place. To understand that this place, even though it feels weird, is nonetheless a valid place in itself.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. Because in some sense, literature does that with every book. Right. That, that it's always, you know, you're always saying, oh, here I am in Alaska on the back of a dog sled, or here I am in the 19th century churning butter, or, you know, there's always something that's, that's not quite like your life. But there is a difference, it seems like, from an author who is conscious of that and aware of it and opens the reader up to the idea of it, versus, for example, my example of being in Wisconsin and writing something taking place in New York City and then reading the next book where it's taking place in New York City and the next one and the next one. And you get the feeling that the authors are treating New York City as the baseline, that that's the norm and that's the something that readers should just come to and Expect. And it. It's not about estrangement, that that's where the normalcy resides.

[Elica Bomer]

Exactly. Yes. So, yes, I mean, I completely agree. Most works of literature count as important works of literature because they plunge us into a certain situation and persuade us to feel it as though we were in it ourselves. What I think this Southern writing, far Southern writing, does kind of in addition is give us a means of navigating and understanding it. It doesn't only plunge us, it also gives us a compass for global reading. You know, it gives us a way of kind of going right out to a place where there, you know, there is no baseline and kind of finding our way back.

[Jack Wilson]

Mm. Do you feel like writing from the point of view of a South inhabitant also comes with the advantage we often see when outsiders are looking at a society and offering a perspective that people who are inside might not necessarily notice about the. You know, the fish doesn't notice that

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

they are swimming through water, for example.

[Elica Bomer]

Yes. Yes, it is that. I think that's the kind of thing I was trying to touch on when I talked about D.H. lawrence's sense of self estrangement, sense of kind of just being all over the place and upside down. He suddenly realizes. And he takes us through this as read as he suddenly realizes that the medium he was completely taking for granted and just thought was the normal. The water goes clockwise down the plug hole and, you know, and there's. And June is warm and December is cold. But the world he's now in, in the Southern hemisphere is completely opposite.

[Jack Wilson]

Right?

[Elica Bomer]

Completely the other way. About to use a writer. Not seen as a great literary writer, but I think he is an amazing writer. Captain James Cook, and I'm breaking the air again here. You know, he was the first European to map the eastern coast of Australia, and he circumnavigated New Zealand. But he also. I mean, and he's a navigator. You know, that's what he does for a living. He's a sea captain, and he talks about this feeling of nothing being quite as it should be. And he also uses writing to process that.

[Jack Wilson]

Do you feel like this perspective also comes with a kind of humility that might be an advantage here, that there is. There's something of value in being overlooked or. Or being treated as the other so much that it means you. You kind of. You kind of have this perspective built in that you're not going to make assertions that are unfounded or be grandiose in your proclamations, but that you're. You're treating things With. With something a little more like I'm going to have to rely on evidence rather than assumption.

[Elica Bomer]

Yes, that's to an extent. I mean, I'm wary about the word humility because it does come quite close to that fringe that we were talking about a little while ago. But there is a sense of a kind of modesty, maybe a sense of, you know, no matter what I do and how. How great the work of literature is that I'm. That, you know, I'm going to publish, people are not going to regard it, unless for particular extraordinary historical reasons, people are not going to regard it as of the same importance as, say, a writer from the US Or Canada or France. But that does allow then. Yes, a kind of sense of just kind of getting on with it. Anyway. I don't know if this is a writer familiar to listeners, but certainly a winner of the Nobel Prize. Patrick White, Australia's only winner of the Nobel Prize, and he became an environmentalist. I think that's very important. He stood up for indigenous rights in Australia, and it was that sense of humor. He just kind of got on with it. He won the Nobel Prize, and then he continued to plug away at the things that were really important to him in his own context and in his own space. So that is, I think, something that is a notable quality across the writers of the Southern Hemisphere. I mean, others continue to be really kind of preoccupied and almost obsessed with being very, very far away. The great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Roges. He writes, for example, in a short story, Sur or simply South. He writes of the kind of the pampas kind of going on forever. And that's frightening to him. Certainly as a child, he was very kind of frightened about being kind of so far away from everywhere. And there's a modern contemporary Argentine writer who kind of picks up on that. Her name is Samantha Schweblin, and she talks about rescue distance, how far you need to be away from, say, the city or indeed a hospital to be rescued. You know, so there's. There's that sense that some of these writers are kind of still exploring. There's a lot of anxiety in this writing as well as a kind of modest.

[Jack Wilson]

Right, right. So my last question is, who did you write this book for, and what are you hoping readers to take away from it? I mean, are you hoping to change the minds of both southern and northern inhabitants, or is this strictly for northerners to kind of wake up? Or what was the purpose and what are your hopes for it?

[Elica Bomer]

The book is for all readers, whether of the north or the South? Yes, there is a particular kind of address to Northern readers, almost a wake up call, you know, notice the South. Use the writings of the south in order to kind of navigate your way there. I'm also addressing Southern Hemisphere readers, you know, I hope in, you know, in English, but in languages other than English too, like Spanish, to say, kind of sit with, kind of, you know, embrace, hold your sense of distance. Because I think it's a valuable feeling to have. It's something that we can, that we can draw on to think about the planet more holistically. I mean, just again, you know, a really important fact that I did quite a bit of research on for writing the book, is that the Southern Ocean, which is the ocean that governs all the pulses of the world's currents, you know, the Gulf Stream and so on, El Nino, the Southern Ocean is warming at a faster rate than any other ocean. And it's been doing that for about 60 years. And we've really only woken up to that in about the last 15 years and started to kind of research it and try to understand it better. That has impacts on bird populations and whale populations and so on as well. And that is, that's a beautiful little nugget illustration of how we forget about the Far south at our peril. So, yeah, I'm talking to northerners, I'm talking to Southerners, I should say. I'm southern born myself. I was born in Southern Africa in the port city of Durban. And so these perceptions that are second nature to me, I'm trying to share in the book as perhaps, you know, needing to be second nature to us all.

[Jack Wilson]

The book is called Southern Imagining A Literary and Cultural History of the Far Southern Hemisphere. Elica Bomer, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.

[Elica Bomer]

Thank you. I really enjoyed it.

[Jack Wilson]

And finally today we hear from John

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

McMurtry, who was here to talk about literary journeys after he and I roamed

[Jack Wilson]

around the world with some of the greatest authors of all time.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

I asked John a special question. Okay. We're joined now by John McMurtry, editor of Literary Mapping Fictional Travels across the World of Literature.

[Jack Wilson]

John, this question comes from a listener

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

who asks, what do you want your last book to be?

[Jack Wilson]

This will be the last book you will ever read.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.

[John McMurtry]

No pressure. Can I get back to you in 50 years with an answer? Although you don't ever really want to live too long, I think, having said that, good question. I'm Just going to come up with an obnoxious answer, which would be Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Because that way I can postpone the inevitable because, you know, the books go on forever and I'm just not going to finish them. So I'll stay here. But that's probably not going to happen. So one of those things will happen. The reading of the books before I kick it, not so much. And if it's going to be, let's say, a painful way out, how about I just settle for some Lydia Davis short and snappy one page stories and go along with the morphine. Well,

[Jack Wilson]

now that is interesting because you've

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

almost chosen

[Jack Wilson]

two polar opposites. Although Lydia Davis translated Proust. Like she's got, you know, you've got some synergy there, but it is almost. Yeah, it's almost like you could spend a whole afternoon in a single Proustian sentence and you can, you know, in the amount of time it would take you to work your way through it, you could read a story or two of Lydia Davis. But it almost seems like maybe having both of those books, maybe one on one nightstand and one on the other, the size of your bed would give you.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

Yeah. Exactly what you needed, depending on where you were in that particular moment.

[John McMurtry]

Or daytime reading, nighttime reading.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

Yeah, yeah.

[John McMurtry]

I think I'll read this sentence today and then pick up another proof sentence tomorrow.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. Or a little Davis, like a little palate cleanser. And then back to the big feast.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

Okay, well, that's a great answer.

[Jack Wilson]

John McMurtry, thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.

[John McMurtry]

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, there we go. That's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature. My thanks to John McMurtry and to

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

Elica Bomer for joining me today.

[Jack Wilson]

We will be back with a philosopher

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

king, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. And we've got some John Ruskin coming up soon. Mike Palindrome is going to be here

[Jack Wilson]

to criticize our list of the 25 greatest books of all time. And we'll reveal number two and number

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

one on that list. Robert Frost is around the corner, as is ETA Hoffman.

[Jack Wilson]

I'm Jack Wilson.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.

[John McMurtry]

Sam. Foreign.

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