Cormac McCarthy’s novels are as innocent of theme and of ethical
reference as they are of plot. On the other hand, each of them constitutes a
densely created world as authentic and persuasive as any that there is in
fiction. The worlds are convincing not because the people in them do normal
and recognizable things, or represent us metaphorically, or even inhabit
identifiable time and space, but because McCarthy compels us to believe in
them through the traditional means of invention, command of language,
and narrative art. To enter those worlds and move around in them effectively
we are required to surrender all Cartesian predispositions and rediscover
some primal state of consciousness prior to its becoming identified with
thinking only. There is a powerful pressure of meaning in McCarthy’s
novels, but the experience of significance does not translate into com
municable abstractions of significance. In McCarthy’s world, existence
seems both to precede and preclude essence, and it paradoxically derives its
importance from this fact alone. The vivid facticity of his novels consumes
conventional formulae as a black hole consumes light. He is Walker Percy
turned inside out?intuitive, unideological, oblivious to teleological fash
ions, indifferent if not hostile to the social order, wholly absorbed in the
strange heterocosm of his own making. Ethical categories do not rule in thisenvironment, or even pertain: moral considerations seem not to affect
outcomes; action and event seem determined wholly by capricious and
incomprehensible fates. His stories are lurid and simple; they seem oddly
like paradigms without reference and are all the more compelling because of
that, since the matter of the paradigm does not lose its particularity in
abstraction. The characters?without utilitarian responsibilities to well
made plots and unrelated to our bourgeois better natures?are real precisely
to the degree that they resist symbolization.
At the end of Outer Dark ( 1968) the road that Culla Holme is following
brings him abruptly to a swamp, and absurdly ends there:
Before him stretched a spectral waste out of which reared only the
naked trees in attitudes of agony and dimly hominoid like figures
in a landscape of the damned. A faintly smoking garden of the dead
that tended away to the earth’s curve. He tried his foot in the mire
before him and it rose in a vulvate welt claggy and sucking. He
stepped back. A stale wind blew from this desolation and the marsh
reeds and black ferns among which he stood clashed softly like
things chained. He wondered why a road should come to such a
place.l
This is as close to a conventional paradigm as McCarthy usually comes, and
it, of course, is a paradigm of a dead-end, paradigmless world (and for its
novel also a kind of gothic, self-referential joke). A more sophisticated
Cornelius Suttree, in McCarthy’s most recent novel, Suttree (1979), dreams
in a delirium that his life is being voided into “a cold dimension without
time without space and where all was motion.” When, past his crisis, he
speaks with an attending priest he tells him that what he has learned close to
death is that God “is not a thing. Nothing ever stops moving.”2 This is
McCarthy’s metaphysic: none, in effect; no first principles, no foundational
truth; Heraclitus without logos. At the end of Child of God (1973), Lester
Ballard, the logic of whose poignant, homicidal loneliness we have attended
step by relentless step, is permitted in death a last socially redeeming value:
at the state medical school in Memphis
he was preserved with formalin and wheeled forth to take his place
with other deceased persons newly arrived. He was laid out on aslab and flayed, eviscerated, dissected. His head was sawed open
and the brains removed. His muscles were stripped from his bones.
His heart was taken out. His entrails were hauled forth and
delineated and the four young students who bent over him like
those haruspices of old perhaps saw monsters worse to come in their
configurations. At the end of three months when the class was
closed Ballard was scraped from the table into a plastic bag and
taken with others of his kind to a cemetery outside the city and
there interred. A minister from the school read a simple service.3
At about this same time the decomposing bodies of Lester Ballard’s victims
are discovered when a team of plowing mules falls through and into the
cave-mausoleum where the dead women are found arranged, “on stone
ledges in attitudes of repose” (p. 195). They are hauled out one by one,
dripping rheum, and as the sheriff and his deputies drive with the bodies
back to town, “in the new fell dark basking nighthawks [rise} from the dust
in the road before them with wild wings and eyes red as jewels in the
headlights” (p. 197). The hawks are an eidetic rendering of the eerie,
inexplicable beauty?and otherness?of McCarthy’s world.
Because that world is one where “nothing ever stops moving” it is
represented by people who are, as he puts it in one place, “fugitive of all
order” or, in another, knowers “of things known raw, unshaped by the
constructions of a mind obsessed with form.” Marion Sylder in The OrchardKeeper (1965) is a rakish, resourceful whisky-runner who not only defies the
authorities but taunts them while scrupulously obeying the terms of his own
human code. His counterpart in the loose narration is Arthur Ownby who
lives alone in the mountains with his dog and year after year watches over an
abandoned peach orchard, on the one hand, and on the other, the de
composing body of a man Marion Sylder has killed in self-defense and thrown
into the old orchard’s insecticide tank. Ownby runs afoul of the law when he
carefully fires twelve partially circumcised shotgun shell casings into a
mysterious goverment tank which has appeared in his woodlands and which
he knows to be the beginning of the end of his solitude. “Ever man loves peace
and an old man best of all,” he thinks later, after a shootout and capture,
remembering proudly what he has done.4 The boy who is the only link
between these two learns an austere integrity from them. His strangematuring is symbolized at the end when he returns to the courthouse in
Sevierville to retrieve the dead sparrowhawk he had turned in for bounty
months before and then, ashamed and appalled, gives back the dollar when
he learns that the authorities do not preserve the hawks for some worthy
purpose but instead burn them.
Lester Ballard, the child of God, is abandoned by his mother after his
father has hanged himself in their barn and his farm has been taken by the
courts. He lives at first in an abandoned cabin which he shares unwillingly
with wild animals (including once a pack of baying foxhounds); eventually,
when his house burns, he lives in caves which become a grisly necropolis, a
makeshift human society populated by young women Ballard has
murdered?mostly with their boyfriends in lovers lanes?and made love to.
He is not motivated by anything that we can speak of; he lives beyond the
pale both socially and psychoanalytically. Since his inner life is closed away
from us he seems like a dreadful unconscious, externalized into unreflective
and unironic action. When he does come to, so to speak, it is after seeing the
face of a boy on a school-bus who he realizes reminds him of himself as a boy,
and so he returns to the hospital from which he has escaped, saying only,
“I’m supposed to be here” (p. 192).
Cornelius Suttree in Suttree has chosen his own exile from his own wealthy
family and from his wife and child to live in Knoxville along the river in his
houseboat among derelicts, thieves, drunks (like himself), whores, and
bootleggers. Living beneath the bridges and viaducts of the city, they form a
renegade anti-community, a Jaycee’s nightmare, which Suttree takes to
embody the truth, or at any rate, not falsehood. The slum district sur
rounding this community is called McAnally Flats, and as Suttree is
recovering from an illness and eventually decides to leave, the area is being
torn down to make way for the new Knoxville expressway (the time is the
middle 1950’s). Suttree thinks of the wreckers, cynically, as “gnostic
workmen who would have down this shabby shapeshow that masks the
higher world of form” (p. 464)?thus allying the novel with psychoanalytic
notions of the modern city as a flight from nature. Suttree is carefully
constructed to express its anti-metaphysical vision. Where all of life is
motion, rich episodes follow upon one another with chaotic improvidence,
the time-spans between them?their temporal relationships unmarked. The
largest units?of time that we are conscious of are the seasons, and this is
mainly because the extreme seasons challenge the ingenuity and survival of
McAnally’s down-and-out residents. The river is the novel’s metaphoric
ground of being, a new rendering of Williams’s “filthy Passaic.”The main characters of McCarthy’s four novels, because of their rural
isolation and poverty, or because they have chosen isolation and poverty, live
a daily hermeneutic adventure, their simple objectives leading them through
mystifying disclosures of meaning with which they become continuous.
They exist in isolated pockets of experience, intersect with each other briefly,
become involved in, or remain auditors of, baroque, wonderful stories of
human ingenuity and hardheadedness or of grotesque cruelty. By this
strategy human life is revealed through anecdote and incident rather than
through thematic patterns, in particulars rather than through types. Rinthy
Holm in Outer Dark is a prototype of the character who knows things raw,
“unshaped by the constructions of a mind obsessed with form.” We do not
know where she and her brother, Culla, live when the novel opens; we know
virtually nothing about her parents, and neither does she. The two of them
inhabit an austere, rural void. When Culla, leaving her for a brief period,
tells her not to take strangers in, she replies, “They ain’t a soul in this world
but what is a stranger to me” (p. 29). When she sets out in search of her
newborn child, which Culla, its father, has left to die in the woods, she
doesn’t know whether she is headed toward town or away from it because
she’s never been there. When she is asked by a suspicious farmer whether she
hasn’t run off from somewhere she says, “No … I ain’t even got nowheres to
run off from” (p. 101). She says to a doctor later, “I don’t live nowhere no
more. . . I never did much. I just go around huntin my chap” (p. 156).
Hunting her “chap” entails hunting a malicious tinker who has in fact found
and taken the abandoned baby. But she has never seen the tinker and he has
never seen her, and she does not even know, until a storekeeper tells her, that
there is “more than one kind.” She has no reason to choose one road over
another since the tinker could be anywhere. Her quest proceeds in a vacuum,
intermittently filled by the sympathetic rural people who help her out but
seem somehow, though they have homes and families, no less wandering in
space than she. She is shrewd and strong and humorous, but she is virtually
without thoughts, driven on and sustained by the simple meaning that she
makes. She remains unaware of the appalling facts which transpire in the
novel’s parallel narrative. In that opposing narrative an evil surrealism
prevails, the dark inversion of Rinthy’s simpleminded, maternalistic grace.
Farmers and towns-people are gratuitously murdered, found hung from
trees; corpses are dug up from their fresh graves and robbed of their clothes.
All of this is phlegmatically perpetrated by three lawless, sadistic night
riders. The last of victims are the tinker and Rinthy and Culla’s child, whose
throat the bearded leader slits, before Culla’s eyes, as dispassionately as if he
were lighting a pipe.In the beginning o? Outer Dark Culla has had a strange dream of a prophet
who promises cures to all the diseased, lame, and blinded assembly of
“human ruin” who attend him, once the sun has gone into and through an
eclipse. But in the dream the sun goes into eclipse and does not return, and
the crowd waits restlessly in the cold darkness for the promise to be fulfilled.
Finally the crowd grows mutinous and turns not upon the prophet but the
dreamer, who himself has asked to be cured, and the dreamer is unable to
hide, even in the darkness. The dream is a parable of the promise of
life?that we may be cured?and the perverse issue ofthat promise in misery
and deprivation. The dreamer is set upon as if he were God, whose broken
covenant is grotesquely inverted by those who, rejected, reject him and in
doing so make their own darkness. Rinthy represents a fragile human
beauty?a promise of sorts?which is merely parallel to the ugliness and
inhumanity which prevail elsewhere; this harsh contrast underscores the
novel’s pervasive concern with the mystifying discontinuities of experience.
When they had done in the kitchen she followed the woman down
the passageway at the rear of the house, the woman holding the
lamp before them and so out into the cool night air and across the
boardfloored dogtrot, the door falling to behind them and the
woman opening the next one and entering, her close behind, a
whippoorwill calling from nearby for just as long as they passed
through the open and hushing instantly with the door’s closing,
(pp. 61-62)
She opened t?ie door and the night air came upon them again
sweetly through the warm reek of the room, the whippoorwill
calling more distant, the door closing and the woman’s steps fading
across the dogtrot and the bird once again more faintly, or perhaps
another bird, beyond the warped and waney boards and thin yellow
flame that kept her from the night, (p. 62)
The whippoorwill had stopped and she bore with her now in
frenzied colliding orbits about the lamp chimney a horde of moths
and night insects, (p. 63)
She put the lamp on the shelf and sat on the bed. It was a shuck tick
and collapsed slowly beneath her with a dry brittle sound and a
breath of stale dust. She turned down the lamp and removed her
dress and hung it over the brass bedpost. Then she unrolled the
shift and put it on and crawled into the bed. . . . When they were
all turned in they lay in the hot silence and listened to one anotherbreathing. She turned carefully on her rattling pallet. She listened
for a bird or for a cricket. Something she might know in all that
dark. (pp. 64-65).
Rinthy is not threatened here. She, in fact, has been taken in by
responsive, if laconic, strangers. Nevertheless, the five pages that it takes to
get Rinthy from washing up to bed are dense with alternating signals of
strangeness, uncertainty, and reassurance. The command of the nuances of
speech and narrative rhythm, of sounds and of visible objects, and even of
silence, is unfaltering. The un-lurid, almost pastoral occasion is a subtle
microcosm, and the whole of the novel is the sum of such occasions. Each
episode, the novel as a whole, and the texture of the prose itself express
repeatedly a sense of the interwoven beauty and terror of life which is the
unassuming beginning and end of McCarthy’s vision. What meaning there
is remains inseparable from the sensation of experience.
Risking portentousness, one might characterize McCarthy’s nihilism as
not simply ambiguous but dialectical. There is Rinthy on the one hand, and
the evil Magi on the other, the whippoorwill’s song and the silence when it
ceases, her dreamed child and the real one. There is Lester Ballard’s helpless
loneliness and hunger for love and the remains of the victims of it, “covered
with adipocere, a pale gray cheesy mold common to corpses in damp places,
and scallops of light fungus [growing] along them as they do on logs rotting
in the forest” (p. 196; the gothic element in McCarthy refers us to what we
contrive to avert our senses from in normal life). During one idle journey
along the river, Cornelius Suttree witnesses at one point a peaceful baptism
ceremony?”total nursin” one of the participants calls it?and hears talk of
being saved; at another point he remembers from his own childhood being
instructed in killing, near the same spot, by an old turtle hunter and
watching a turtle’s skull being blown away ” in a cloud of brainpulp and
bonemeal”: “the wrinkled empty skin hung from the neck like a torn sock”
(p. 119). At the end of the novel, as Suttree hitchhikes out of Knoxville, he is
approached and offered a dipper of cold water by a boy who is carrying water
for a road-construction crew (they are building the new expressway): “Suttree
could see the water beading coldly on the tin and running in tiny rivulets and
drops that steamed on the road where they fell”; he sees himself for an instant
in the blue of the child’s eyes (p. 470). Then moments later, after he has been
picked up, he looks back and the child is gone. In his place has come an
“enormous lank hound. . . sniffing at the spot where Suttree had stood” and
he recalls the hounds of the huntsman of one of his feverish dreams,
“slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in thisworld” (p. 471). Such juxtapositions are calculated, but they are suggestive
rather than schematic. Their disturbing effect is condensed in a story told to
Suttree by an old railroad man. Back in the days when he had “used to hobo a
right smart” he had been passing through the mountains in Colorado in a
slatsided boxcar crouched in a corner against the winter wind. But the car
catches fire from a match he has flipped away, and when he is unable to stamp
out the flames he leaps from the ascending train into a snowbank; “and what
I’m going to tell you you’ll think peculiar but it’s the god’s truth. That was
in nineteen and thirty-one and if I live to be a hunnerd year old I don’t think
I’ll ever see anything as pretty as that train on fire going up that mountain
and around the bend and them flames lightin up the snow and the trees and
the night” (p. 182). This could not seem very peculiar to Suttree, since it is
the minimal point of his experience that we dwell inescapably in paradox and
should learn to be willing to do so, since things could be a lot worse.
The clear, good water that recurs in the novels is a simple representation of
what is desired of the world but is a provisional image only, not a symbol of
redemption. When Gene Harrogate, Suttree’s hilarious young neighbor, is
rescued by Suttree after days of being trapped under debris and sewage in a
vast cave under the city, his lunatic plan to blast his way through the
foundation of a bank disastrously thwarted, he says first of all, “I hate for
anybody to see me like this” and then, “I’d give ten dollars for a glass of
icewater. . . . cash money”?thus comically uttering a serious refrain, the
story of anyone’s life in McCarthy’s world (p. 277). One of the mysteriously
affecting moments in Outer Dark comes when Rinthy and the farm family
that has taken her in stop along the hot road to town to drink from a spring.
“That’s fine water, the man said. Fine a water as they is in this country. She
took the cup from him and dipped it into the dark pool, raised it clear and
drank. It was sweet and very cold.” Such images and episodes rhyme with
each other meaningfully. They also ground and reinforce episodes of greater
apparent import. One such is Suttree’s wholesomely erotic interlude with
the young daughter in a family of mussel-shell gatherers which ends when
she is killed beneath a landslide of slate. The small moments are subtly
foregrounded and achieve significance because they form a whole with the
otherwise dominating spirit in the novels of violence and perversity. The
vague dialectic is one point; its irresolution is the other.
In this context something grander Yeats wrote comes to mind: “The
human soul would not be conscious were it not suspened between contraries,
the greater the contrast the more intense the consciousness.” In McCarthy’s
novels intensity of consciousness is not that of any given character. His
technique is to represent characters who are strikingly devoid of consciousness, insofar as we are permitted to see. The intensity of consciousness
is the novelist’s?or that of the novel itself?and then ours as we are
compelled to cross over from our world into his. His daring range of styles is
essential to this effect. On the other hand, all of McCarthy’s novels are
unusual for the high degree of unassimilated raw material they accomodate.
His world stands forth vividly. His scrupulous reproduction of detail
(reflected in the precision of his language), his casual command of the right
names for things?for parts of things, for aspects of various processes, and
how things get done?his respect for the taxonomic specificness of the
natural world, are like Joyce’s in that they give his work a deep cohesion that
mere shape and plot cannot. And this method has its point, too?that the
raw materiality of the world is both charismatic and overpowering: the ego is
as fragile and as transient, and perhaps as illusory, as any imagined form.
The negotiations between the ego and the contary world are a main issue
in Suttree, since for its protagonist the nature of identity is a primary,
consuming mystery. It is, however, through his friend Harrogate that the
point is most affectingly conducted. Known also as country mouse and city
rat and?for good reason?as the moonlight melonmounter, Harrogate is
oblivious to such morbid distractions as ontological insecurity. He is a
resourceful survivor for whom poverty is an exhilarating game. Yet when he
is arrested finally, trying to rob a store, and is sent to the state penitentiary,
he is made by McCarthy, in a passage of remarkable originality and insight,
to seem virtually to disappear. On the train to Brushy Mountain Prison
Harrogate is without thoughts; he merely watches from his window, sees
things as they pass: a cornfield and the dark earth between dead stalks; flocks
of nameless birds; winter trees against a winter sky; a woman tossing a
dishpan of water into the yard and wiping her hands on her apron; a little
store at a crossing; a row of lighted henhouses; a lighted midnight cafe.
Then, abruptly, as the train moves into the dark rainy country, the windows
become tear-stained, black mirrors: ” and the city rat could see his pinched
face watching him back from the cold glass, out there racing among the wires
and the bitter trees, and he closed his eyes. ” To think of Harrogate dispersed
into the world and then to remember him free, contriving his endless,
baroque schemes, is to perceive the real and metaphorical horror of prison
life, of passivity and inaction, and to consider how it is that schemes and
scheming hold the world at bay. This long, saddening account of Har
rogate’s journey has begun with the observation?his or the narrator’s: “It is
true that the world is wide” (p. 439). The dreadful reality within the
clich??that we are not the world nor the world us?would not be likely to
occur to Harrogate as a thought, but it has entered his mind, and weexperience it his way.
Suttree himself is an educated and reflective character, the anthithesis of
freewheeling Harrogate, and he is paralyzingly aware of everything that
Harrogate’s industry and simplicity shield him from: the true horror of
death; the sure corruption and end of all friends, all love, all singular,
cherishable things; the impersonal relentlessness of time; the cruel absence of
God from the world. He is obsessed also with the arbitrariness of identity, of
how even that minimal coherence erodes when reassuring reflectors or the
conventions of social roles or homes and families fail. (He is haunted by
doppelg?ngers, especially that of a twin brother who died at birth.) Living
on the river off of his trotlines seems to be saturation therapy for him, a way
of confronting head-on and dealing with the chaos and violence that he both
identifies with and fears, a choice to endure authentically at the risk of both
his selfhood and sanity. Insofar as McCarthy’s vision and technique allow for
anything like an epiphany, a small one seems to issue from Suttree’s
experience when he irreverently tells the priest who has come to attend his
death (Suttree is a genuinely lapsed Catholic, not a fake Burgessite one): “I
learned that there is one Suttree and one Suttree only” (p. 461). This means
of course that there is only one Suttree lifespan, complete in itself; but it also
appears to signify not a realization about identity but a choice?that a
Suttree of the many possible in a world of antiform must be made to be. In its
minimal way, this is also an affirmation. Not long before his grisly contest
with typhoid fever and its accompanying allegorical derangement, Suttree
has himself attended the death of the old ragpicker who is the novel’s oracular
voice of nihilism’s despair, cursing life and God, and himself as well (he has
tried to contract with Suttree to be soaked in coaloil and burnt on the spot
when he dies). Looking upon his body Suttree is moved by his own residual
existential stamina to think about him for the first time and to reject him.
“You have no right to represent people this way, he said. A man is all men.
You have no right to your wretchedness” (p. 422). This intellectual gesture
implies a tenuous hold upon purpose and it seems to be a stage in the same
subterranean process by which becoming one Suttree becomes a rational
goal. It is a product of experience rather than naive faith, since for all the
atrocity and deformity, alienation, bone-deep physical pain, and violent
death Suttree witnesses and suffers, his various undejected friends have borne
him care and have embodied for him a heartening, hell-raising stoicism. So
the as yet inchoate one Suttree is fully conscious of the two symbolic acts at
the end, drinking the water and fleeing the hounds. Wrenchingly conflicted
as this amazing world of McCarthy’s is, from which logos has been borne
away, even an illusory choice, an illusory transcendance gets one through tothe next place in one’s life where something bizarre or exhilarating or
moving?worth surviving for?obscurely waits. In Cormac McCarthy’s
novels, adjusting a notion of the self to an understanding of the nature of the
world is a baffling and precarious enterprise, since it is the essence of that
world, in all the novels, that form and meaning refuse to coincide. Experi
ence, meanwhile, continues to insinuate questions while supplying no
answers, leaving the articulate and the inarticulate alike fatefully free.
