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Redemption as Language in Cormac McCarthy's Suttree

2004; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 53; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/014833310405300308

2056-5666

John Rothfork,

Gothic Literature and Media Analysis

While all of Cormac McCarthy's fiction is recondite, most of his characters are primitives who, in high contrast to their maker, have only rudimentary facility with language. Their ponderous and slack attention, located somewhere between animal sentience and flail human engagement in culture, fascinates us because enigmas of perception and consciousness seem to be more exposed, more primal, and less concealed or contaminated by language and manners. It is hard to imagine conversation with these characters who seem offered up for examination. McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965), is peopled by shabby backlanders trafficking in wares of earth who conjure up images of witch covens and congresses of fiends and warlocks (82, 31, 66). There are renegades from medieval world--vespertine figures, rotund and druidical--and figures who suggest earlier periods when troglodytes gathered in some firelit cave (120, 150). McCarthy's second novel, Outer Dark (1968), depicts nightmare world so primitive that it seems to illustrate prelinguistic state of frustration. Characters wander amid a nameless black ballet wherein they barely utter unanswered cries of supplication. The title seems to allude to Matthew's Gospel, which suggests loss of paradise: But children of kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth (8:12). At beginning of novel, characters stir to life, still with no word among them [...,] squatting on their haunches, eating again wordlessly. They depart unannounced and mute (4). A Christ-child figure lies maimed or diseased, gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back night in an inarticulate gesture that suggests rejection of life (18). Child of God (1973) completes what we might describe as McCarthy's trilogy of primitivism. The novel traces degeneration of Lester Ballard, a misplaced and loveless simian shape, into serial killer and part-time ghoul (20, 174). McCarthy's first three offer studies of primitives, backlanders, and bogtrotters who talk to dogs more often than to people and who infrequently compose themselves for rare and anxious forays into outposts of such civilization as can be found in an Appalachian country store or in confrontation with sheriff of Sevier County. This pattern leads Matthew Guinn to characterize early as bleak and naturalistic landscapes [...] occupied by characters with primitive drives and simian shapes, more homunculi than human being (108). All three titles, as well as plots, suggest religious themes centering around suffering and hope for answers, if not redemption. A less ambitious assessment would suggest that perhaps there is only hope of rendering primal emotions into speech so that we can begin to ask what these often violent feelings mean. William C. Spencer finds that early are more about sin or evil as tendency within human beings, perhaps even as essence of human beings (73). An emphasis on disobedience and destruction, however, presumes articulation of moral that is object of dim-sighted and nearly instinctive groping where we listen to characters who only haltingly express their inchoate thoughts. Perhaps motivated by primitive emotion, Judge Holden in Blood Meridian (1985) is highly articulate in attempting, Tim Parrish says, to propagate philosophy of Nietzsche, which he finds the most coherent statement in McCarthy's of any moral order (35). The search for moral order, or lack of it in Nietzschean or Darwinian thought, collapses in Border Trilogy, where self-conscious narration and aesthetically conscious role-playing become kind of pragmatic and postmodern answer to enigmas about consciousness raised in early novels. Robert L. Jarrett calls style of Border Trilogy a self-referential rewriting of earlier novels (314). …