Suttree and the Metaphysics of Death
1985; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1534-1461
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
ResumoGods and fathers what has happened here, good friends where is there clemency? Suttree is standing in the ruin of a great house where he may or may not have lived as a child. He is surrounded by warped parquetry, buckled wainscot, ruined plaster. We are reminded of another wail crying for what is lost: Kennst du das Haus? Auf Saulen ruht sein Dach, Es glanzt der Saal, es schimmert das Gemach, Und Marmorbilder stehn und sehn mich an: Was hat man dir, du armes Kind, getan? But there will be no Protector to take Suttree by the hand and lead him down the happy highway back to the land of lost content. He does not cry Dahin! He is in his own country; he is standing in the actual house. The journey he has made is not one of space or distance or even time. He has put all his past life behind him, programatically and totally. In my father's last letter he said that the world is run by those willing to take the responsibility for the running of it. If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent. This dumbshow is what Suttree has chosen. He has flown by many nets: religion, family, marriage, education, a job, respectability. He has taken himself out of the roles of son, husband, and father. His associates are outlaws, alcoholics, prostitutes, perverts, murderers, thieves. Of all the figures in the dumbshow, Suttree is haunted most by the memory of his twin brother who was stillborn. I saw how all things false fall from the dead ... If our dead kin are sainted we may rightly pray to them. Mother Church tells us so. She does not say that they'll speak back, in dreams or out.... He lies in Woodlawn, whatever be left of the child with whom you shared your mother's belly ... I followed him into the world ... And used to pray for his soul days past. Believing this ghastly circus reconvened elsewhere for alltime. He in the limbo of the Christless righteous, I in a terrestrial hell. This is more than apt description. Suttree is in Hell, and by his own volition. Make no mistake; this is no hippie lying on his back, growing hair and blowing grass. He has not taken the simple slide along the path of least resistance. His is an active life; the rules are hard but simple: exploit no one and be not exploited, avoid money and steady employment, kiss no one's ass. Know the limitations you have set. To escape into memory or fantasy is dangerous. You will surely die, but put it off as long as possible. This is the here and now that Suttree lives in. It is, in its brilliantly rendered surface, an actual place in a real time: McAnally Flats, a slum area of Knoxville, Tennessee in the early 1950's. (1) McAnally was at that time a high-crime area, with more than its share of blind pigs, aggravated assaults and bootlegging. On that level, we can ask why anyone would choose to live like this. On another level we may ask why anyone has chosen Hell, but that is a very old question indeed. This essay will try to account for Suttree's choice. Cormac McCarthy is the latest example of that most American of phenomena: a superb writer who is totally unknown to the general public. Unknown, but not unrewarded. He has received many grants and fellowships. He has published four novels, and a fifth novel has been announced. Suttree, his masterpiece, was published in 1979 (New York: Random House), and is already out of print. Aside from reviews and brief mention in fiction chronicles, there have been only a handfull of full-dress essays on his work. One of these is Further into Darkness: The Novels of Cormac McCarthy, by Professor John Ditsky. (2) In this essay, Professor Ditsky assesses McCarthy's place in the mainstream of Southern literature. …
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