Disgust in the Early Works of Cormac McCarthy
p. 61-87
Résumés
Although critics quickly recognized that Cormac McCarthy was a writer who dealt with grotesque and violent material in an uncommonly forthright manner, many saw this aspect of his work as an indication of his lack of maturity as a writer. Walter Sullivan, for example, who called McCarthy “certainly the most talented novelist of his generation” and “the only writer to emerge since World War II who can bear comparison to Faulkner,” nevertheless rebuked him for his “limited use of an enormous talent.” “In his almost exclusive concern with the grotesque McCarthy offers a distorted view of creation, fragmented and debauched though that creation now may be,” Sullivan stated. What he and others missed, however, was the degree to which these elements of the grotesque, the violent, and the disgusting were fundamental to McCarthy’s artistic and philosophical vision. Sullivan offered this comment when reviewing McCarthy’s fourth novel, Suttree, and in the 25 years since McCarthy has continued to use the trope of disgust as a major part of his work. What has become clear through his subsequent writings is that McCarthy’s view is far from “distorted,” as Sullivan felt. As McCarthy has moved toward his major image of the “matrix,” considered in ecological, philosophical, and even spiritual terms, his apparent indulgence with the appalling and transgressive in the early works must now be seen in this larger context. And as our own cultural fascination with disgust has grown, our ability to appreciate the inclusiveness of McCarthy’s view of creation must also expand. This study examines McCarthy’s early explorations in the awful and repulsive, and it attempts to show that these first works foreshadow the more complex and complete vision found in the later works, especially “The Border Trilogy.”
grotesque, Faulkner, creation, distorted, vision, disgust, fascination.
Les critiques ont eu tôt fait de voir en Cormac McCarthy un écrivain manipulant des matériaux grotesques et violents d’une manière directe inhabituelle. Pourtant, beaucoup ont interprété cet aspect de son œuvre comme un signe de manque de maturité chez l’écrivain. Walter Sullivan, par exemple, qui baptisa McCarthy « le romancier certainement le plus talentueux de sa génération » et « le seul écrivain à percer depuis la Seconde Guerre Mondiale qui tienne la comparaison avec Faulkner », lui a cependant reproché de faire « un usage limité de son énorme talent ». Et d’ajouter : « Dans son souci presque exclusif du grotesque, il propose une vision déformée de la création, quand bien même cette création serait désormais fragmentée et dévoyée ». Ce que Sullivan et d’autres n’ont cependant pas vu, c’est le degré auquel ces éléments du grotesque, du violent et de l’écœurant étaient fondamentaux à la vision artistique et philosophique de McCarthy. Sullivan proposa ce commentaire dans sa recension du quatrième roman de McCarthy, Suttree ; dans les vingt-cinq années qui suivirent, McCarthy n’a pas cessé d’employer ce trope du dégoût comme un élément majeur de son travail. Ce qui est devenu clair à travers ses écrits suivants, c’est que sa vision est loin d’être déformée au sens où l’entendait Sullivan. Comme McCarthy a évolué vers son image principale de la « matrice », considérée en termes écologiques, philosophiques et même spirituels, son goût apparent du répugnant et du transgressif tels qu’il a émergé dans les premières œuvres doit maintenant être envisagé dans ce contexte plus large. En outre, comme notre propre fascination culturelle pour le dégoût a grandi, notre capacité à apprécier l’ampleur de la vision de la création chez McCarthy doit aussi se développer. Cet article étudie les premières explorations que McCarthy a menées dans le domaine de l’horrible et du répugnant. Il s’efforce de montrer que ces premières œuvres annoncent la vision plus complexe et plus complète trouvée dans les romans ultérieurs, en particulier dans La Trilogie des Confins.
grotesque, Faulkner, création, déformation, vision, dégoût, fascination.
Texte intégral
1We live in an age fascinated with disgust. It has become a favorite topic of biological study, of psychological analysis, of literary criticism, and of popular entertainment. In the United States, film and television regularly employ revulsion for dramatic and comic effect. As digital and other forms of special effects grow more sophisticated, horror or “splatter” films try to outdo each other in their depictions of carnage. More serious films (Silence of the Lambs, Seven, the Quentin Tarentino œuvre) present dark alternate worlds in which violence and the grotesque is the norm. Hannibal Lecter himself is one of the chief representatives of the end of the 20th Century and the beginning of the next, and in his various films he has evolved from brilliant but insane cannibal to inflamed lover, a figure of dark romance.
2On American television, this fascination with the macabre has become a prominent feature of prime-time viewing. Doctor and detective shows take us each week into morgues where medical examiners (usually women) probe, slit, chisel, and gut corpses in various states of decomposition.1 Autopsies have become erotic highlights in almost every mystery, and HBO’s Six Feet Under, whose central characters are morticians, is only the most obvious invitation to treat Death as a fascinating Date. These programs are fiction, of course, but at other times (with appropriate warnings) you can watch Actual Autopsies on HBO, the corpse’s face discretely blurred but the rest of the body, and the insides of that body, on open display.
3Meanwhile, prime time game programs, carefully identified as “reality” shows, repetitively show contestants in states of debasement and humiliation. Cartoons like South Park go even farther in their animated representations of infirmity, deformity and death, and of deviant behaviors including incest, coprophagia, cannibalism, castration, and sadomasochism.
4However, disgust can be a topic of serious study, a way to understand our humanity (and an argument could be made that some of the works mentioned above, like South Park, do exactly that). When Charles Darwin confronted the subject in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), he defined it primarily in relationship to the mouth and the sense of taste. Disgust, he felt, was essentially the body’s defense against sickness and contamination through ingestion. Since Darwin, the “domains” of disgust have been expanded. In a 2000 publication, the psychologist Paul Rozin (with Jonathan Haidt and Clark R. McCauley) determined nine broad categories that can elicit revulsion: “food, body products, animals, sexual behaviors, contact with death or corpses, violations of the exterior envelope of the body (including gore and deformity), poor hygiene, interpersonal contamination (contact with unsavory human beings), and certain moral offenses.” As they summarize, “We argue for a path of development in individuals and cultures that extends from the presumed origin of disgust as a rejection response to bad tastes, in the service of protecting the body, to the full range of elicitors listed above, more appropriately described as in the service of protecting the soul” (637).
5Yet further study has concentrated on whether disgust is culturally acquired (as Rozin believes), conditioned at an early age (as Freud proposed), or biologically and evolutionarily “hardwired” into our brain or perhaps even our genes (as researchers like Valerie Curtis, Paul Ekman, and Mary Phillips, in different ways, suggest). It remains a complicated and fascinating subject. William Ian Miller has written perhaps the best overall discussion of the emotion in his book The Anatomy of Disgust (1997), a witty, insightful, and compelling work devoted to the science, politics, and culture of what revolts us and why.
6 From a literary perspective, which is that of this essay, the two names most closely identified with disgust are Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva. In Rabelais and His World (1965), Bakhtin examined the comedy, the exuberance that can be found in representations of degradation and debasement, the “bodily lower stratum of grotesque realism” (23). Kristeva, in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980), pondered on those things that contaminate and threaten our wholeness from a psychological perspective:
Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary, uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.
It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. (4)
7When we thus consider Cormac McCarthy’s use of disgust as a tool in his writing, we have to see his work in this larger context. His unflinching observation of the awful and repulsive is undoubtedly one of the reasons we are so often intrigued by his work. This is especially so in the early novels, written during that time when McCarthy was a little-known author admired mostly by a small group of critics and readers. These southern works, exuberant and daring, sometimes seemed to take comic delight in turning our stomachs. But we also knew something more was at work here. Who else, for example, could write a book about a murdering necrophile, calmly (almost scientifically) observe his unspeakable acts, acknowledge the utter horror of his deeds ( “Gray soapy clots of matter fell from the cadaver’s chin” [Outer Dark 196]), and yet make us understand and even accept the main character as a fellow human being?
8In 1969, just after the publication of Outer Dark, McCarthy gave one of his few interviews, this one to Richard Jordan of the University of Tennessee Daily Beacon (McCarthy had been a student at the university but never graduated). “I like gutsy writers,” he told Jordan. “Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, Joyce, Faulkner. I like Melville, particularly, and more recently, Flannery O’Connor. She hasd [sic] a wonderful sense of the macabre” ( “Just Write”). While “macabre” is not the same thing as “disgusting,” McCarthy’s statement does reveal his taste for the shocking and “uncanny.” Even his term “gutsy” implies that bold willingness to split the skin, to probe inside, to examine the hidden and smelly and revolting stuff of life and death.
9McCarthy was, in fact, chastised early on by Walter Sullivan (among others) for this proclivity. In his review of Suttree, Sullivan wrote,
McCarthy is certainly the most talented novelist of his generation. He is the only writer to emerge since World War II who can bear comparison to Faulkner.... But I, for one, can also deplore what seems to me to be a limited use of an enormous talent. In his almost exclusive concern with the grotesque McCarthy offers a distorted view of creation, fragmented and debauched though that creation now may be. I hope he will read Faulkner again and learn how to broaden his scope and enlarge his image (341, 343).
10But Faulkner himself was no slouch at representing the foul and repellant. Recall Addie Bundren’s stinking meat or Jack Houston’s disarticulated leg or the sewer of vomit, piss, and shit that runs through Sanctuary. And if McCarthy devoted too much of his early talent to such unsavory material, he was nonetheless in good company: Chaucer, Dante, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Swift, Hobbes, Freud, Orwell, Sartre, Céline, Genet, Burroughs (all men), these are the high masters of disgust. Add to them (as Miller insists we should) the Christian fathers and any number of preachers and saints. Indeed, we might argue that McCarthy was anticipating, preparing us, for the new level of disgust tolerance demanded by our present culture. As noted earlier, film and television have made the perverse, the sadistic, the excremental both commonplace and expected. One suspects that poor Lester Ballard might well duck his head and blush in embarrassment if he were with us now.
11With the passage of years we can now see, I believe, that Sullivan overstated his case—the grotesque and disgusting are part of a much larger whole even in these early works—but we can also acknowledge that, in a sense, McCarthy ultimately took Sullivan’s advice. It seems fair to say that after Suttree scenes of outright disgust occur much less often. To be sure, the very next book, Blood Meridian (1985), is to many readers his most appalling, but I would argue that it is a spiritual horror evoked by the relentless violence and inhumanity in the novel rather than specific examples of physical revulsion that dominates the work. A typical example from Blood Meridian describes the Indians “hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals...” (54), admittedly awful enough, but the events are so indiscriminate—random Indians slaughter random filibusterers—that we remain removed, distanced from the individualized moments of horror. I, for one, am shocked by the scene, but I am not repelled by it.
12On the other hand, the events in Blood Meridian that evoke the greatest unease in me as a reader are those that present solitary victims whose suffering is so outrageously pathetic as to make me somehow complicit. Sproule’s rotting arm, for example, is described as “swollen to the size of his thigh and it was garishly discolored and small worms worked in the open wound” (67), a repellent combination of the outlandish (size) and the particular (worms). When the great bear sweeps the Delaware Indian from his horse and carries him off, my disgust comes from the paradoxical gentleness of the moment: “the man dangling from the bear’s jaws looked down at them cheek and jowl with the brute and one arm about its neck like some crazed defector in a gesture of defiant camaraderie,” and he is last seen “dangling from its mouth like a doll” (137). Panic, screams, defensive measures: any of these reactions would make the scene less terrible to me than the abject “dangling.” But it is the description of the snake-bitten horse that evokes my greatest horror:
... this thing now stood in the compound with its head enormously swollen and grotesque like some fabled equine ideation out of an Attic tragedy. It had been bitten on the nose and its eyes bulged out of the shapeless head in a horror of agony and it tottered moaning toward the clustered horses of the company with its long misshapen muzzle swinging and drooling and its breath wheezing in the throttled pipes of its throat. The skin had split open along the bridge of its nose and the bone shone through pinkish white and its small ears looked like paper spills twisted into either side of a hairy loaf of dough. (115)
13 In a book filled with death and suffering, inflicted on both animals and people, including such atrocities as a tree hung with dead babies “Bald and pale and bloated, larval to some unreckonable being” (57); a man decapitated and left sitting at campfire “as before save headless, drenched in blood, the cigarillo still between his fingers, leaning toward the dark and smoking grotto in the flames where his life had gone” (107); a “small and misshapen” idiot whose “face was smeared with feces” and who sits “peering at them with dull hostility silently chewing a turd” (233); or any number of other nightmares, I still find Sproule, the Indian, and the horse most disturbing to consider. It is the pathetic element—Sproule is embarrassed (mortified?) to show his gangrenous arm to the kid; the Indian seems to swoon in the bear’s deadly embrace; in its misery the clownish horse (compare to Ab Snopes’ horse magically transformed by Pat Stamper and his helper in Faulkner’s The Hamlet to see how close McCarthy is to comedy in the awful scene) tentatively approaches its kind and is kicked, bitten, isolated—that most sickens me.
14These examples to a degree illustrate Kristeva’s concept of the abject, the liminal state of misery and degradation and “horror” that comes from losing sense of who or what we think we are or should be. “I am at the border of my condition as a living being” (3), she writes, which is where we find Sproule and the Indian and the horse (not human, of course, but also not completely a “thing”: it has self-awareness; it perceives its alienation). Each is somewhere between life and death, but also between a “natural” and “unnatural” physical state: Sproule’s arm ballooned to the size of his thigh, the horse’s head also swollen into a exaggerated comic mask, the Indian forlornly abducted as if by “some fabled storybook beast” (137) into a place “beyond all reason or reprieve” (138). And despite the horror of the examples, we as readers are drawn to the experience aesthetically. The descriptive language mediates; we suffer only by proxy, at least for the moment, although deeper awareness tells us that our time will come. As Kristeva tells us, “On close inspection, all literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to me rooted, no matter what its sociohistorical conditions might be, on the fragile border (borderline cases) where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject” (207).
15My unsurprising generalization, then, is that in his early works, McCarthy’s use of disgust is primarily comic, Rabelaisian, sometimes self-satisfied in its impulse to shock; whereas in the later works a greater empathetic sense of pity and sadness controls the descriptions. I know this statement is open to dispute. One could easily point out a scene like Troy’s description of the decapitated jackrabbit heads embedded in the automobile grill in Cities of the Plain (21-22), McCarthy’s most recent novel, to illustrate that the author has not completely forsaken this type of appalling comedy ( “they was all looking out, eyes all crazy looking. Teeth sideways. Grinnin” [22]), and certainly “abjectness” plays a major role in works such as Outer Dark and Child of God.2 But I would still argue that, in general, McCarthy’s stories have grown more somber over the years and that his fascination with the grotesque and repulsive has shifted to a greater consideration of the transcendent and sublime. At the same time, in the early work we can also see that the moments of disgust are intended for more than a quick shock or horrified gasp and call for a more comprehensive and, I think, integrated view of existence.
16We know little of McCarthy’s early attempts at fiction before his first novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965), but the two stories he published while in college at the University of Tennessee neatly illustrate paths his later work would follow.3 In October 1959, McCarthy (as C. J. McCarthy, Jr.) contributed his story “Wake for Susan” to the Orange and White, the literary supplement to the university student magazine The Phoenix. In March 1960, he published (as C. J. McCarthy, dropping the “Jr.”) “A Drowning Incident.” Written, one assumes, in his twenties, these stories are more than juvenilia and anticipate characters, settings, and themes to come in the novels.
17“Wake for Susan” is a melancholy, romantic tale. A young boy, Wes, is hunting in the “time-haunted woods” (3). He finds an old rifle-ball from the previous century, and that “relic” then recalls to him a nearby burial ground he had once visited. There he finds, among the “bearded stones... moss-mellowed and weather-stained in that rustic way which charms lovers of old things” (3), one dated 1834 memorializing Susan Ledbetter, a girl dead at seventeen. As Wes sits by the grave, he recreates this girl and imagines himself living in this time past as her suitor. Susan’s early death moves him to a more universal grief:
A sea of love and pity welled up in Wes. Great tears pushed one another down his cheek. He threw his arms around the unyielding stone and wept for lost Susan, for all the lost Susans, for all the people; so beautiful, so pathetic, so lost and wasted and ungrieved. (6)
18Although the epigraph to the story comes from Sir Walter Scott, McCarthy seems equally influenced here by Thomas Wolfe, yearning for lost innocence and idealized love. As Rick Wallach notes, the “nostalgic element in McCarthy’s mature work is prefigured by the progress of Wes’ reveries... Nevertheless, his daydream collapses against the irreducible fact of her mortality” (16).4 We will find variations of this pattern of love and loss in Suttree, All the Pretty Horses, and Cities of the Plain, all of which elaborate on the basic narrative (Suttree and Wanda, John Grady Cole and Alejandra, John Grady Cole and Magdalena. The Crossing also offers it own variations).
19The second story reveals a different side of the young writer. Again the protagonist is a boy, but this one seems younger and his motives much less engaging. In a long first paragraph we watch him as he runs from his house, occupied by his mother and a baby, into an old, rotting outhouse in the back yard. This excremental site establishes the ambience of the story as a whole. The family dog Suzy has recently given birth to puppies in the abandoned shelter, and he can still smell their “faint sourmilk odor” (3) combined with the earthiness of the old waste below. The boy seems oppressed and confused by the fecundity surrounding him here and in his own home. When he spots a cricket in the out building, he rashly steps on it, picks up the crushed body to examine “a thick white liquid... oozing from it,” and then drops it through the seat hole into the dirt and foulness below. As he watches, a black widow spider approaches the cricket and begins “a weaving motion over it with her legs as if performing some last rite. Soon the cricket’s leg stopped.” Then, with final callousness, the boy “shot from his tongue a huge drop of spittle” onto the spider and cricket, and observes as the spider retreats, “trailing a thin string of spittle which hung in mucous loops among the strands of the web” (3).
20This establishing paragraph takes us rapidly into the fundamental world through its emphasis on excrement, guts, intestinal fluid, saliva, birth, and death. As Wallach nicely puts it, in this story McCarthy has “banished sentimentalism” and replaced it with “succulent” descriptions of the “organic world” ( “Early Short Stories” 18). Leaving the outhouse, the boy next goes into the woods and comes to a bridge over a creek. He lies down on the bridge, staring into the water, contemplating, at which point he sees a dead puppy, “rolling and bumping along the bottom of the creek, turning weightlessly in the slow water... turning its white belly to the softly diffused sunlight, its legs still and straight in an attitude of perpetual resistance” (3). Following its progress down the stream, the boy comes to another bridge and there finds a “dark burlap sack” submerged in a pool.
As he stared, a small head appeared through a rent in the bag. It ebbed softly for a moment, then, tugged by a corner of the current, a small black and white figure, curled fetally, emerged. It was like witnessing the underwater birth of some fantastic subaqueous organism. It swayed hesitantly for a moment before turning to slide from sight in the faster water. (4)5
21Unlike Wes in “Wake for Susan,” this boy has “no tears, only a great hollow feeling which even as he sat there gave way to a slow mounting sense of outrage.” When he pulls the sack from the water, he finds the last puppy within, “curled between two bricks with a large crawfish tunneled half through the soft white belly. He hooked his wire into the crawfish and pulled it out, stringing behind it a tube of putrid green entrails. He tried to push them back inside with the toe of his shoe.” Realizing that his father has drowned Suzy’s litter, the boy enacts his revenge by taking the remaining corpse back to his home and placing it in the crib with the infant, his sibling. “He remembered vaguely seeing the green entrails oozing onto the sheet as the blanket fell.” The story ends in present tense, with the boy waiting for his act to be discovered, for his father to “come home” and punish him (4).
22This is a crude, primal story in which elements of disgust reflect a series of conflicting and complicated feelings in the boy. He is motivated by a fear of and anger toward his unseen parents, especially the father who has so betrayed him by siring the baby and killing the puppies. But his own heedless crushing of the cricket in the outhouse roughly parallels his father’s deed: the impulse to destroy is found in them both. The boy also strongly resents the human baby with its “faint urinous odor... sensuously fetid and intimate” (similar to the “sourmilk” smell of Suzy and her pups), and his impulsive act of revenge is vaguely directed against the family in general, against the house itself. “What prompted his next action was the culmination of all the schemes half formed not only walking from the creek but from the moment the baby arrived,” we are told (4). He reacts out of Œdipal urges of revolt and resistance, inextricably mixed in his mind with these objects of birth and death. He equates the intrusive (and apparently sickly) baby in the bedroom with the dead, decomposing puppy, which, “curled fetally,” mimics a grotesque birth as it emerges from the sack underwater. The boy even replicates another bizarre birth by drawing forth first the crawfish and then the trailing intestines through the pup’s stomach.
23In the boy’s mind, the baby is the reason his father has killed the puppies. He at first tries to make the remaining animal whole again by putting the entrails back inside the stomach where they belong, and he does so fastidiously, with the shoe rather than his hand. But he is also trying to return the baby, his sibling, to that prebirth state, whether it be in the mother’s body or at some vague point of preconception. (His reaction anticipates Culla Holme’s horror/repulsion at the birth/intrusion of his and his sister Rinthy’s son: like the boy, Culla would wish to deny it birth.) Since this is impossible, he finally proclaims his father’s sins of sex and murder by placing the dead puppy in the bed with the unwanted baby, twining or juxtaposing them for his parents to see. He brings contamination into the nursery, brings the outhouse into the main house, and confronts the sickness that seems to permeate the family. He also, by association, acknowledges his own wish to kill the baby that has brought such resentment and anger into his life. It is a desperate act, a public display of the kind of sexual revulsion and spiritual nausea that will later afflict Cornelius Suttree, haunted by his own dead twin.
24This is a lot of baggage for an early story to carry, and I suppose it is possible to read this overwrought work as dark comedy. But the sense of sexual confusion and guilt is too palpable, the heavy weight of punishment too threatening to encourage it.
25 The Orchard Keeper, McCarthy’s first novel, might well be seen as a fusion and continuation of these two stories. “Wes” of “Wake for Susan” could easily grow into John Wesley Rattner, one of the three major characters in this book. He, too, is sensitive, roams the woods, traps and hunts, feels deeply the passing of time both physically and in the natural world:
The first weeks of September went and the weather held and no frost. The veins were coming up in his arms and he would press them and then raise his fist and feel the blood in the soft tubes.
He was pushing time now and he could feel it give. (65)
26John Wesley is an adolescent, and (as illustrated in the two stories discussed above), he has to learn about death not as romantic fiction but as physical fact. Although his mother has created a mythic image of his vanished father and swears the son to avenge his supposedly treacherous death, the boy seems largely unmotivated by her stories. Indeed, the chief irony of the book is that John Wesley will become good friends with the two men, the killer and the guardian, who know the most about his father’s fate, but since none of the three has the full knowledge necessary to connect the events, the story must remain unfinished and incomplete. By the time the corpse is finally identified, Marion Sylder is in jail for bootlegging, Arthur Ownby has been placed in an asylum, and the boy has left home on his own life journey.
27But John Wesley is a student of death in other ways. As a child he discovers a “young rabbit” at the bottom of a dry well in his yard, a variation of the outhouse pit in “A Drowning Incident.” He is “afraid to climb down after it” (63), but he attempts unsuccessfully to keep it alive by dropping lettuce into the hole. As a teenager he has grown less fastidious about death. When he finds the hurt sparrow hawk, he takes it home and tries to heal it, but when it dies, he turns it in for bounty. The woman at the courthouse is offended by its decomposed state, “an odor rich and putrid” emanating from the “billowing well of feathers” (78), but John Wesley handles the remains without hesitation. Later he learns to trap and skin animals. He shows his friend Warn Pullen the mink he has caught. “Fur’s slippin, Warn said. Whew, here. He handed the mink back.” John Wesley has now come to accept the commonplace of death and decay. “It would soon be nothing but bones, but he wouldn’t come to see, like when he dug up the flying squirrel he had buried in a jar and found only bones with bits of fur rolling around inside the glass like bed-lint” (206). At no point does John Wesley’s interest seem unhealthy—although he shares with Lester Ballard a fascination with death, he finds no prurient satisfaction in it—and he comes to accept it as one of life’s lessons.
28The world of The Orchard Keeper, like the natural world itself, contains foul and fair, and McCarthy’s imagery never lets us forget the elemental, the organic, the mortifying. As others have pointed out, the community of Red Branch is in a state of perpetual rot, and images of contamination abound. “Even the speed with which [the houses] were constructed could not outdistance the decay for which they held such affinity.... Some terrible plague seemed to overtake them one by one” (11). The hillside before Arthur Ownby’s shack is “littered with all manner of cast-off things”; the structure itself is “green with fungus” and is slowly falling to pieces (56). His dog Scout is ancient, scarred with mange. At Mr Eller’s store, roaches scuttle about the candy case, and the meat case is defaced by “brown stains like tobacco spit or worse” (115). When the lawman Gifford buys a soda, he holds the bottle up for examination, “studying viscosity and bead, suspicious of foreign matter” (116). At one point kittens with “blind and suppurant eyes” stagger and slip in “puddles of tobacco spit” (182) at the store.
29But decay and infection extend beyond this rural enclave. Market Square in Knoxville is, from one perspective, a terrifying place, an outdoor abattoir “where hams and ribcages dangled like gibbeted miscreants and in the glass cases square porcelain trays piled with meat white-spotted and trichinella-ridden, chunks of liver the color of clay tottering up from moats of watery blood, a tray of brains, unidentifiable gobbets of flesh scattered here and there” (82). The meats themselves lose shape and identity like Lester Ballard’s eviscerated and dismembered body during autopsy, reduced to brains, muscles, heart, and entrails before the rest is “scraped from the table into a plastic bag” (194) and hauled off for anonymous burial. Distinct in the market crowd are the blind and the crippled and the maimed. The conclusion of the book continues this theme of diminishment. “They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone” (246), the narrator intones, and the verbal echo of Eliot’s The Waste Land— “I had not thought death had undone so many” (l. 63)—leads us to Dante’s Inferno from which the line is taken (Canto 3), and thus ends with in a state of spiritual dis-ease.
30The book also examines John Wesley’s emerging sexuality is terms of disgust reaction. In The Anatomy of Disgust, William Miller distinguishes between the Freudian concept of disgust as a protective barrier against uncontrolled desire and the idea that disgust can also serve as punishment for overindulging in that desire. He describes the first as “reaction formation” (using Freud’s own term), which occurs when “disgust joins with shame and morality to work as a dam... to hold back the sexual instinct.... Disgust is there to prevent the activation of unconscious desire, or, more precisely, disgust is part of the very process of repression that makes such desire unconscious” (109). Like the boy in “A Drowning Incident,” John Wesley is confused and frightened by sex, and he flees from it on two different occasions. Once, wandering at night in the field, he comes across “two figures struggling in the grass, naked, white and frantic in the gloss of the quarter-moon as stranded fish” (66). He runs away and climbs a tree (Arthur Ownby also sits in trees). A more detailed example can be found when John Wesley remembers encountering an older girl, the sluttish Wanita Tipton. She is brazenly, indeed almost cartoonishly, sexual. Her cotton dress barely contains her breasts and belly: “white flesh and pink silk pursed out between the buttons” (69). She chews on a weed and engages in sexual banter with the unwitting boy.6 Wanita follows John Wesley to the creek and wades in the water while he fishes (as in earlier examples, creeks and rivers reveal hidden knowledge). He notices that she has a leech attached to her leg, a “fat brown one just below her knee with a thin ribbon of blood going pink on the wetness of her shin” (71). He points it out to the girl, who demands that he “take it off.” Hell, I never put him there, the boy reasonably replies. The scene continues:
Standing like that in water halfway to his waist and her up on the rock he could see up her thighs to where the skirt was tucked into her bloomers. He got hold of the leech, trying to look up and not look up at the same time, and feeling giddy, shaky, and pulled it loose and flipped it past her onto the bank....
He had felt for a minute that he wasn’t even afraid of her any more and all he could remember now was running. The huge expanse of flesh and the bloomers and her holding him by the collar with her feet somehow in the water on either side of him until he jerked away with his shirt ripping loudly and splashed back through the creek to the bank and out and across Saunders’ field. . . . (71-72)
31This scene describing adolescent male sexual confusion is, in one sense, convention enough, not unlike Joe Christmas’s shame and bafflement with Bobbie Allen in Light in August, to name one obvious comparison. The older girl is the knowing aggressor; the boy is naïve, flustered, and finally afraid. He flees from the “huge expanse of flesh” that engulfs him, but it is the disturbing “fat brown leech” that focuses his and our attention. It is phallic, to be sure, and it causes her to bleed, and it gives the boy a chance to sneak glances at her upper thighs almost despite himself. But it also acts as a deterrent: its sluggish grossness, its parasitical attachment serve as warning to the possibility of further horror beyond. This is a place John Wesley is not yet ready to go, and when Wanita’s legs entrap him, sexual panic ensues. He is still shamed months later by the event.
32 Indeed, The Orchard Keeper invariably conflates sex with defilement, illustrated through images of disgust. Marion Sylder, for example, is attracted to the dirty and “ill-shapen,” women grotesquely fat or thin (29). When he and June Tipton (surely kin to Wanita) take two girls to the Olive Branch Negro Baptist Church at night for sex, Marion uses the chapel while June goes to the outhouse (another reference to “A Drowning Incident”). The next morning Marion brays in disbelief, “You mean to say you... screwed her in a nigger shithouse sittin on the...” (22). He is unable to finish his sentence, but the connection between sex and evacuation is clear. This girl had also earlier wet her pants in fright while riding in Marion’s speeding car, so the excremental debasement is doubled. The racial element— “nigger shithouse”—only adds to Marion’s laughter and to June’s shame. The old man Arthur Ownby, who, sitting on the porch of his house, watches them drive to the church, perceives their purpose from hearing one of the girls laugh and remembers his own youth, recalling a long-ago moment with his wife “sitting high on the wagon seat Sunday morning that the mule broke wind in his ear while he unhooked the singletree . . .” (21). Later, after his wife runs away with a Bible salesman and Ownby goes to reclaim her, he is shot in the leg, “above the knee and higher, almost... to where a man surely oughtn’t to be hit” (92).
33But Uncle Ather has other memories as well. He recalls, as a boy, taking a shortcut with friends and passing a house where they see a woman “undressing for bed.” His friends go back for a “second look,” but he refuses and now remembers it “with dim regret.” While Ownby is recalling this memory, he is on the orchard road, walking “to the pit” for his own “second look” (89). This obvious repetition of phrase, only five lines apart on the page, conflates the naked woman of his memory with the object of his present journey, the body he has guarded for almost seven years.7 A living sensual woman framed in the window of her house and a rotting corpse coffined in the confines of a cement insecticide pit become extensions of one another, separate but linked in his mind and ours.
34This body, of course, anchors The Orchard Keeper and deserves further attention. The corpse is that of Kenneth Rattner, John Wesley’s father and one of McCarthy’s most repulsive characters. When he shoplifts at the beginning of the book, he moves with a “slithery sound” (8) as befits his name, Rattner. When he later drinks a beer, “his lips sought the glassrim and fastened on it white and fat as leeches” (the image anticipating Wanita Tipton) “while under the yellowgray skin his throatcords jerked spastically.” The bartender watches “with both fascination and disgust, as one might watch pigs mate” (23). When Sylder discovers him in his car at Jim’s Hot Spot, Rattner grins “in a slow cheesy rictus,” anticipating his future role as corpse. McCarthy tells us, “Something loathsome about the seated figure kept him from reaching for it violently, as a man might not reach for bird-droppings on his shoulder” (33), and while in his presence, Sylder feels “a terrific need to be clean” (34). It is likely that Rattner has killed a man while hitchhiking— he has the man’s billfold (15)—just as he will soon try to kill Marion Sylder. Indeed, his very presence seems to be the final insult that causes the porch of the Green Fly Inn to collapse.
He came through the door and onto the porch, circumspectly, nodding across them all with diffidence, as if someone he knew might be there, beyond the railing itself and suspended mysteriously in the darkness... his eyes shifting among them or when they looked closing or seeking again that being in the outer dark with whom only he held communion, smiling a little to himself, the onlooker, the stranger. (24)
35Almost immediately the porch creaks, pops, and begins to disengage from the building, and men fall away “with wild cries into the pit below” (25).
36Rattner is thus linked with evil, “that being in the outer dark with whom only he held communion,” and his death occasions one of McCarthy’s most horrific descriptions, a terrible mixture of obscenity and bizarre comedy. It’s a slow motion strangulation. (One might compare it to a similar scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain, released in 1966, the year after The Orchard
37Keeper was published, in which Paul Newman and a woman silently stab, pummel, choke, and then suffocate in a gas oven an East German policeman. The scene is equally comic and awful). Rattner makes the first move, striking at Sylder from behind with a car jack after Marion squats to change a tire. When he fails to kill Sylder with the first blow, he attempts to run, but Marion, although his shoulder is broken, still manages to grab Rattner: “his fingers cocked like a cat’s claws unsheathing and buried themselves into the cheesy neckflesh of the man who fled from him without apparent headway as in a nightmare” (38). Falling to the ground, they lay together, Sylder on top, “motionless for the moment as resting lovers” (38). When Sylder begins to strangle him, Rattner slowly reacts. The description is insistently offensive: “And the jaw kept coming down not on any detectable hinges but like a mass of offal, some obscene waste matter uncongealing and collapsing in slow folds over the web of his hand. It occurred to him then that the man was trying to bite him and this struck him as somehow so ludicrous that a snort of laughter wheezed in his nose (39).” Strangling him is “Like squeezing a boil.” He watches the dying man with “mesmerized fascination” (39), and when he finally kills him, he feels Rattner’s windpipe “collapse like a dried tule” (40), an image that ironically reminds us of his son John Wesley’s pressing his own veins, throbbing and pulsing in his arm, as he “pushes” time forward.
38In life Kenneth Rattner is despicable: a liar, a thief, most likely a murderer. McCarthy’s physical description underscores his degenerate nature. Rattner is putrefactive even while alive; once dead his body quickly advances into a state of decomposition. When Sylder opens the car trunk containing the body, “he didn’t expect the stench that followed, poured out upon him in a seething putrid breath” (44), and he vomits, “retching, finally falling to his knees and heaving in dry and tortured paroxysms” (45). Returning to the car, he “sniffed tentatively, then resolutely reached into the foul darkness and clamped his hand over one leg.” Avoiding the smell, he turns his head as he pulls the body out and drags it across the ground to the insecticide pit; then he rests still holding on to the leg, “afraid if he turned loose he would not touch it again” although he remains conscious of his hand “hooked around the suppurant flesh.” Once he dumps the body in the “moldery water” of the pit, he speaks to it “in a voice skirting hysteria: You son of a bitch. You rotten son of a bitch” (45).
39Although we might assume that Sylder’s horror is connected to his guilt, he actually shows no regret at killing Rattner, now or later. His reaction is one of physical revulsion, not spiritual despair, and once the body is removed from sight and smell and touch, he regains control and puts it from his mind. Indeed, he continues to use the vicinity of the burial pit for his bootlegging operation. When Arthur Ownby later discovers the corpse, it is still monstrous, and the moment is appropriate to a horror film: “The thing seemed to leap at him, the green face leering and coming up through the lucent rotting water with eyeless sockets and green fleshless grin, the hair dark and ebbing like seaweed.” Like Sylder, Ownby staggers off to retch, “trying to fight down the coiling in his stomach.” He too hides the corpse, by cutting a small cedar tree “with which to put it from sight” (54). For years he will repeat this ritual, and by the seventh year he sits on the rim of the pit, dangles his feet near the water, lights his pipe, holds the match out to peer at the surface, and thinks, “There was nothing. The dead had risen and gone,” although at that moment a “small, almost tentative slosh” (91) from the pool reminds him that the dead might linger longer than he supposes and he quickly trots away.
40Nevertheless, once in the pit, the corpse undergoes a transformation into a thing of wonder and even of desire. In the asylum near the end of the book, Ownby recollects “the green cadaver grin sealed in the murky waters of the peach pit, slimegreen skull with newts coiled in the eyesockets and a wig of moss” (224). The image might remind us of a similar metamorphosis described by Ariel in The Tempest when the spirit sings of the drowned king: “These are the pearls that were his eyes,” lines also referenced in The Waste Land (ll. 48, 125). Eliot later employs another image of a moldering, transforming body:
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying, Stetson!
You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
Oh, keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
Or, with his nails he’ll dig it up again! (ll. 69-75)
41Corpses “sprout,” undergo rebirth, and while Rattner’s body never “blooms,” I am tempted to connect it to the curious elm tree introduced at the beginning of the book, the one that has grown around and encased a shaft of the cemetery’s wrought-iron fence, making it a seemingly unnatural combination of inert metal and living wood. According to Mrs. Rattner, her husband had a platinum plate in his skull as a result of war injury, metal encased in flesh and bone. It is this apocryphal treasure that draws Legwater to dig through the ashes and calcium bits, all that remain of the body after it is accidentally incinerated in the pit by the boys’ fire.8
42In Ownby’s mind, he has somehow failed in his duty to the corpse by not insuring it a respectful burial, which the ceremonial seven years in the water and under the branches would apparently provide. He thinks that the body’s soul has possibly transmigrated: “Lots of times that happens, a body dies and their soul takes up in a cat for a spell. Specially somebody drownded or like that where they don’t get buried proper” (227). He assumes that the cat Mr Eller hears squalling in the sky, carried off by the hawk, is that soul, “bound most probably for hell” (228). Now he is rid of the body as well: “I don’t have to fool with him no more except he ought not to of got burnt, that ought not to of happent and may be I done wrong in that way to of let that happen, but it’s done now and he’s gone... and I hope they don’t nobody hear no more from him never” (228). Ownby compares his care for the body to his shooting of the tank (both Rattner and the tank are described as “ikons,” 36, 93); in his mind both acts are moral obligations. He repeats to himself that “I never done it to benefit myself,” elaborating, “Shot that thing. Like I kept peace for seven year sake of a man I never knowed nor seen his face” (229), suggesting that marking the tank, which he knows will bring the authorities to the vicinity of the crypt, also marks the end of his care for the corpse.
43What McCarthy does with disgust in his first novels, it seems to me, is twofold. On the one hand he occasionally indulges in grossness, sets out to shock us with his unflinching descriptions of things and actions that quite naturally repel us. He is often comic in these episodes, and there is an essential element of black humor in them. But he also is forcing us to admit to, and then (dare I say it?) embrace the range of what it means to exist as a living and dying organism. William Miller captures this moiling essence of being and then not-being wonderfully. Nature is, he writes,
fraught with anxiety-provoking and ultimately disgust-generating processes: eating, fornicating, excreting, dying and decaying. Life soup, seething, roiling, oozing in dankness or lukewarmness, is what disgusts. Not because all ends in death, but because there is no fixed point. All is flux and in flux, eternal recurrence. Nothing stands still. (106)
44But this process is exactly what McCarthy seems to celebrate, perhaps even regard as sacred. As Cornelius Suttree tells the priest after recovering from his near-death delirium, “[God] is not a thing. Nothing ever stops moving” (461). In other words, at bottom, God is “Life soup.”9
45If we accept this reading, then McCarthy’s books open up in intriguing ways. The comic image of Warn Pulliam flying his tethered turkey buzzard like a kite illustrates an appreciative acceptance of nature’s way (although we might question the morality of keeping such a creature confined in this manner): “Here, don’t get too close or he’ll puke on ye.... Don’t nobody think much of him I reckon but me” (134). Culla Holme’s cowardly denial of his scarred, monstrous child (a reflection of Culla’s own guilt) is also a denial of life (he repeatedly opts for “Nothing”), while his sister Rinthy’s deep desire to find and nurture her baby reveals an acceptance of existence in all its manifestations. Lester Ballard is a pathetic lost soul, to be sure, and like Kenneth Rattner he is repulsive and grotesque. He is “small, unclean, unshaven,” and one of his first acts is to urinate (4).10 After he is hit in the head with an axe, he can’t “hold his head right.... It must of thowed his neck out someway or another” (9), and as the book continues and he enacts necrophilia, his body transforms (he wears the clothes and hair of his victims) and begins to come apart (an arm is shot away). By the end, he has become nothing but parts. But there is humanity in him, distorted though it may be, and ultimately something more. It is significant that in describing his autopsy, McCarthy again goes to Eliot, in this case “The Dry Salvages” (third poem of the Four Quartets), to remind us of the mystery of existence. The examiners, “four young students” bent over Lester’s entrails, are identified as being “like those haruspices of old” who “perhaps saw monsters or worse to come in their configurations” (194). Eliot writes:
To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
Observe disease in signatures, evoke
Biography from the wrinkles of the palm
And tragedy from fingers...
......
To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
When there is distress of nations and perplexity... (V, ll. 1-6, 11-14)
46He then turns to the greater mystery:
But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint— (V, ll. 17-19)
47 In his own pathetic way, Lester Ballard may, in his desperate explorations, have approached exactly that “intersection,” a place where revulsion and sublimity become one.
48Finally there is Suttree. It contains more disgusting episodes that one could easily list, but at the top would be the extravagant example of Gene Harrogate’s being engulfed by “the slowly moving wall of sewage, a lava neap of liquid shit and soapcurd and toiletpaper from a breached main” (270). Although Harrogate is often participant/victim in many of these events—the watermelon incident, the killing and butchering of the hog, various drunken escapades—Cornelius Suttree, the novel’s protagonist, offers a more interesting case. His name implies both outdated aristocracy and, for readers of George Washington Harris, incipient anarchism, and he is in many ways a split character (he is haunted by dreams of the still-born twin with whom he shared his mother’s womb). He comes from a well-to-do family and has attended college, but he lives alone in a houseboat on the polluted Tennessee River, his livelihood that of a fisherman, and roams through the filthy slums of Knoxville. Although he is companion to Harrogate and many other of the “[r]uder forms” that inhabit the area, he is not of them, and he and they know it. Indeed, for the most part Suttree is fastidious, watches from the sidelines, fears contamination. He does not eat the fish he catches in the foul river but sells them to others. Sometimes he shares a bottle but most often sticks to his coffee or drinks his occasional beer. When he stands before a filthy urinal, he worries that germs might travel in retrograde up the connecting stream, might ford the liquid bridge his body fluids have momentarily made with the vile world around him. He keeps himself at distance, both physically and emotionally, and is obsessed with his own “uniqueness.”
49But not always. There are moments when Suttree gives himself over to the very disgust he normally avoids. As Freud (among others) tells us, we are often repulsed by the very things that unconsciously we most profoundly desire, and when Suttree gives in to these desires, he does so with both dread and complete abandon. Some of the most brilliant and perfectly awful passages in the book describe the aftermath of these episodes. “Suttree lay with his hands palm up at his sides in an attitude of frailty beheld and the stink that fouled the air was he himself” (80). “Tottering to his feet he stood reeling in that apocalyptic waste like some biblical relict in a world no one would have” (81). “You smell like you been dipped in shit,” a policeman tells him (83). “My life is ghastly,” Suttree will later summarize. As Miller explains, this form of disgust, which comes after rather than before the act, kills (for a time) the desire since it “dies in its own ‘too-much’” (110). But Suttree’s condition reflects a greater soul-sickness, a nausea of denial and despair. His is a forfeited existence, which is a definition of the abject, and in this sense he is not that distant from Lester Ballard. Only after a nightmarish and brutal illness, one in which his body breaks down in fits of diarrhea, vomiting, and bleeding, does he return to the living, purified by the fever of self-knowledge. He recognizes himself as inextricable from the world around and in him. He is, in himself, all humanity, all being, the universe at large: hence his statement that “there is one Suttree and one Suttree only” (461).
50In The Crossing, McCarthy introduces the image of the “matrix,” the view of our existence as complexly interconnected by patterns both surface and deep, ranging from the cosmic to the sub-microscopic and beyond. “So everything is important. Every least thing,” the priest tells Billy Parham. “This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised” (143). And this awareness, I think, helps explain McCarthy’s fondness for and celebration of the disgusting. It is the energy of life in all its gooey, sticky, stinking, rotting, generating, eternal, outrageous, insulting, comic, holy vitality that he recognizes. The matrix is “life soup” itself. To “despise” it is to deny being alive.
Bibliographie
Des DOI sont automatiquement ajoutés aux références bibliographiques par Bilbo, l’outil d’annotation bibliographique d’OpenEdition. Ces références bibliographiques peuvent être téléchargées dans les formats APA, Chicago et MLA.
Format
- APA
- Chicago
- MLA
Works cited or noted
Arnold, Edwin T. “McCarthy and the Sacred: A Reading of The Crossing.” In Lilley, New Directions 215-38.
Arnold, Edwin T. and Dianne C. Luce, eds. Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Rev. ed. Jackson. University Press of Mississippi, 1999.
10.4324/9780429355363 :Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. 1965. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
10.1097/00005053-195601000-00016 :Darwin, Charles. The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. 1872. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1965.
Ditsky, John. “Further Into Darkness: The Novels of Cormac McCarthy.” Hollins Critic. 18.2 (April 1981): 1-11.
Eliot, T. S. The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1971.
Faulkner, William. The Hamlet. New York: Random House, 1940.
Fisher-Wirth, Ann. “Abjection and “the Feminine” in Outer Dark.” In Lilley, New Directions 125-40,
Guillemin, George. A Shadowed Agony in the Garden: The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy. College Station: Texas A & M UP, 2004.
Jordan, Richard. “‘Just Write’ Says Successful Author.” University of Tennessee Daily Beacon. 28 January 1969: 6.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. 1980. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.
Lilley, James D., ed. Cormac McCarthy: New Directions. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2002.
Luce, Dianne C. “The Road and the Matrix: The World as Tale in The Crossing. In Arnold and Luce, eds., Perspectives 195-219.
Luce, Dianne C. “‘They ain’t the thing’: Artifact and Hallucinated Recollection in Cormac McCarthy’s Early Frame-Works.” In Wallach, Myth, Legend, Dust 21-36.
McCarthy, C. J. [Cormac]. “A Drowning Incident.” The Phoenix [University of Tennessee Orange and White Literary Supplement] March 1960: 3-4.
McCarthy, C. J., Jr. [Cormac]. “Wake for Susan.” The Phoenix [University of Tennessee Orange and White Literary Supplement] October 1959: 3-6.
McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West. New York: Random House, 1985.
McCarthy, Cormac. Child of God. New York: Random House, 1973.
McCarthy, Cormac. Cities of the Plain. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Crossing. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Orchard Keeper. New York: Random House, 1965.
McCarthy, Cormac. Outer Dark. New York: Random House, 1968.
McCarthy, Cormac. Suttree. New York: Random House, 1979.
10.4159/9780674041066 :Miller, William Ian. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard UP, 1997.
Rozin, Paul, Jonathan Haidt, and Clark R. McCauley. “Disgust.” In Handbook of Emotions. 2nd edition. Ed. M. Lewis and J. M. Haviland-Jones. New York: Guilford, 2000): 637-53.
Sullivan, Nell. “The Evolution of the Dead Girlfriend Motif in Outer Dark and Child of God.” In Wallach, Myth, Legend, Dust 68-77.
Sullivan, Walter. “Model Citizens and Marginal Cases: Heroes of the Day.” Sewanee Review 87 (April 1979): 337-44.
Wallach, Rick. “Prefiguring Cormac McCarthy: The Early Short Stories.” In Wallach, Myth, Legend, Dust 15-20.
Wallach, Rick, ed. Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2000.
Notes de bas de page
1 Quincy [1976-84] was the first TV show to do this. In the 1990s, both The X Files (which routinely showed female medical examiner Dana Scully studying weird and grotesque corpses) and the less successful Millennium expanded audience tolerance for the horrific.
2 A number of critics have explored the concept of “abjection” in these books. Among the more useful are George Guillemin in his book-length study A Shadowed Agony in the Garden: The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy (forthcoming from Texas A & M University Press, 2004), Nell Sullivan’s discussion in “The Evolution of the Dead Girl Friend Motif in Outer Dark and Child of God,” Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy, and Ann Fisher-Wirth’s “Abjection and ‘the Feminine’ in Outer Dark,” in Cormac McCarthy: New Directions. Fisher-Wirth compares McCarthy to Kristeva’s identification of Louis-Ferdinand Céline: “he is a ‘borderlander’... between being and nonbeing, whose ‘journey to the end of the night’... becomes the ‘privileged signifier’ of the power and meaning of horror’” (127). Although I quote Kristeva in my essay, I am not attempting to read McCarthy primarily through her critical approach.
3 These stories have been little discussed, but two important studies are Rick Wallach’s “Prefiguring Cormac McCarthy: The Early Short Stories” and Dianne C. Luce’s “‘They aint the thing’: Artifact and Hallucinated Recollection in Cormac McCarthy’s Early Frame-works,” both found in Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy.
4 In “Wake for Susan,” Wes dreams a chaste romance—they embrace, kiss, and then Wes leaves while Susan stands at the door “breathing very quietly and imagining him still there with his arms around her” (6). Nevertheless, the dream is not totally innocent. As Wes imagines himself in his reverie, he would kiss Susan on the cheek “and rise stiffly and stand there stoically” before he “would tumble out into the sharp night and run most of the way home” (5). His sexual tension is evident. And, as Wallach reminds us, the object of his desire is dead. The necrophiliac impulse is hidden and romanticized, but it is there nonetheless. See also Sullivan, “The Evolution of the Dead Girl Friend Motif in Outer Dark and Child of God.”
5 Similar scenes occur elsewhere in McCarthy’s work, especially in Suttree, which is filled with dead things, including a fetus, floating in the river. In The Orchard Keeper, after a flood John Wesley Rattner watches as “A naked and swollen young bird turned up its round white belly briefly, rolled and folded into the thick brown liquid like a slowly closing eye” (178). He then pulls up a trapped mink, drowned and partially mangled by a cat: “he could see white places on it like hanging leeches... the clean ugly slits, white and livid. Wounds, but like naked eyelids or dead mouths gaping” (179). At one point he saves a hound from being drowned by a raccoon. Another character, Marion Sylder, observes a litter of kittens, their eyes “closed and festered with mucus as if they might have been struck simultaneously with some biblical blight.” “A Christian’d of drownded em,” he tells the storeowner Mr Eller (180-81). In Outer Dark, an old woman, a “crone,” accuses Rinthy of drowning her baby: “Bagged for the river trade I’d judge.” “That’s a lie what you said,” Rinthy answers her (112). Near the end of the book the hogs run over the cliff into the river and drown, and Culla follows them to escape the drovers’ intentions to hang him. Lester Ballard almost drowns while crossing the flooded creek with his goods: “He could not swim, but how would you drown him: His wrath seemed to buoy him up” (156). In Blood Meridian, the judge buys a litter of puppies and tosses them from a bridge into the “swollen waters” of a river. The Vandiemenlander then shoots them as they race downstream (192-93). In The Crossing, the gypsy tells Billy Parham a tale of being trapped in a mountain gorge for ten days as it rained and the river rose and of seeing a drowned man in the water, “shot out of the cataract upriver like a pale enormous fish”:
He’d come already a long way in his travels by the look of him for his clothes were gone and much of his skin all scrubbed away by his passage over the river rocks. In his circling in the froth he moved all loosely and disjointed as if there were no bones to him.
... But when he passed beneath them they could see revealed in him that of which men were made that had better been kept from them. They could see bones and ligaments and they could see the tables of his smallribs and through the leached and abraded skin the darker shapes of organs within. He circled and gathered speed and then exited in the roaring flume as if he had pressing work downriver. (408-09)
6 A similar scene occurs in Child of God, when Lester Ballard is taunted by one of the neighboring dumpkeeper’s daughters, who offers to show him her breasts for a quarter.
Just let me owe ye, said Ballard.
Say you want to blow me? the girl said.
I said owe, said Ballard, flushing. (29)
7 I noted the Rattner-cat connection in a paper given at the First International Cormac McCarthy meeting in Berlin in 1998. George Guillemin discusses in greater detail both this and the corpse-naked woman connection in The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy.
8 This scene is clearly inspired by the conclusion of Faulkner’s The Hamlet, in which Henry Armstid digs at the Old Frenchman place looking for gold.
9 For further discussions of the matrix image, see my essay “McCarthy and the Sacred: A Reading of The Crossing”; and Dianne C. Luce, “The Road and the Matrix: The World as Tale in The Crossing.”
10 John Ditsky noted in 1981 that “Lester is soon seen urinating, defecating, and masturbating. The atmosphere, particularly within the abandoned house where Lester takes up residence, is one of rot and decay; man is but another particle within a material nature in this novel” ( “Further Into Darkness: The Novels of Cormac McCarthy.”)
Auteur
-
Edwin T. Arnold
Appalachian State University
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