“Awake from Dark to Dark”: The Use of Southern Intertextuality in Outer Dark

George Guillemin

p. 89-108

Résumés

Cormac McCarthy’s second novel, Outer Dark (1968)—which in the eyes of some critics seems to ignore the southern literary tradition—arguably constitutes a (con)temporary apex of that tradition, taking the psychological tendency of the Faulkner tradition to extremes. In fact, it transcends that literary tradition by reducing it to the function of a stage set and then using it for the dramatization of a specific narrative purpose. The argument is substantiated by certain instances of direct intertextuality with antecedent southern fiction, specifically with Faulkner’s Light in August, O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, and her novel The Violent Bear It Away. With the help of these links, the subsequent discussion will first position Outer Dark within the tradition of southern gothic fiction, then use the established context to show how pastoral nostalgia— traditionally associated with southern pastoral fiction—lapses here into a generic crisis of the southern pastoral imagination.

Demonstrating first of all that Outer Dark is structured as a purely allegorical composition (and therefore cannot be considered a mimetic work of fiction), the argument will explain the insertion of surrealist imagery as a narrative device used to turn much of the novel’s landscape into a representation of Culla’s (and the narrator’s) psychic inscape. Inversely, pastoral decay in Outer Dark escalates into universal desolation, until the surrealist adaptation of southern stock images has created a virtual southern microcosm. Within the structural and semantic parameters of this microcosmic allegory on the vanity of southern pastoralism, the narrator’s abject sense of pastoral seeks the desolation of the “garden” rather than accept the loss of the pastoral dream. Seen so, the narrative purpose of Outer Dark is to propel traditional southern pastoralism to its logical, if worst, denouement: the narrative destruction of a mythologeme using its very iconography.

South, tradition, intertextuality, Gothic, Faulkner, pastoral, decay, abject, iconography.

Outer Dark, le second roman de Cormac McCarthy (1968), qui aux yeux de certains critiques semble ignorer la tradition littéraire sudiste, peut aussi s’interpréter comme le point culminant contemporain (et temporaire) de cette même tradition, portant à l’extrême comme il le fait l’orientation psychologique de la tradition faulknérienne. En réalité, il transcende cette tradition littéraire en la réduisant à la fonction d’un accessoire scénique et en l’intégrant dans la dramatisation d’un objectif narratif spécifique. Cette argumentation est justifiée par certains exemples d’intertextualité directe avec la fiction sudiste antérieure, en particulier Light in August de Faulkner, « A Good Man Is Hard to Find » de O’Connor, ainsi que son roman The Violent Bear It Away. Ces liens permettent ensuite de positionner Outer Dark dans la tradition de la littérature gothique du Sud, puis d’utiliser le contexte ainsi établi pour montrer comment la nostalgie pastorale — traditionnellement associée à la fiction pastorale sudiste — tombe ici dans une crise générique de l’imagination pastorale sudiste.

Démontrant tout d’abord que Outer Dark a la structure d’une composition purement allégorique (et donc ne peut être considéré comme une œuvre de fiction mimétique), la thèse envisage l’insertion d’images surréalistes comme un procédé narratif utilisé pour transformer une bonne part du paysage romanesque en représentation du paysage intérieur psychique de Culla (et même du narrateur). Inversement, la déchéance pastorale dans Outer Dark atteint le niveau de la désolation universelle, au point où l’adaptation surréaliste d’images typiquement sudistes finit par créer un microcosme sudiste virtuel. Au sein des paramètres structuraux et sémantiques de cette allégorie microcosmique sur la vanité du pastoralisme sudiste, le sens de l’abject qu’a le narrateur du pastoral cherche le déclin du « jardin » au lieu d’accepter la perte du rêve pastoral. Vue ainsi, la finalité narrative de Outer Dark est de précipiter le pastoralisme sudiste traditionnel vers sa conclusion logique, sinon catastrophique : la destruction narrative d’un mythologème en utilisant sa propre iconographie.

Sud, tradition, intertextualié, gothique, Faulkner, pastorale, déchéance, abject, iconographie.


Texte intégral

All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage. So. Here are the dead fathers. (Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian 146)

1Cormac McCarthy’s second novel, Outer Dark (1968), includes a variety of intertextual links with southern literature. Identification of these links affords amazing insights regarding the novel’s—and the author’s—place within their literary historical context. Interestingly, the structural aspects of such intertextuality seem to matter more than the semantic ones. These structural aspects are best introduced by highlighting not a literary but a pictorial parallel between the novel and Hans Holbein’s 1538 series of woodcuts entitled “Images of Death.” The woodcuts depict people from all walks of life, caught off guard by Death who is depicted in the figure of a hideously grinning skeleton. Among the analogies between the woodcuts and Outer Dark, the motif “Expulsion of Adam and Eve” relates to Culla and Rinthy’s wanderings through a terrestrial purgatory,1 “Bones of All Humanity” to the robbed graves, “The Mariner” to the ferryman, “The Husbandman” to the farmer Rinthy stays with, “The Chapman” to the tinker, “The Old Man” to the snake hunter, and finally “The Young Child” to Culla and Rinthy’s baby. All of these characters in the novel are killed by “a grim triune” (129) of assassins whose textual presence is initially restricted to six italicized miniatures less than a page long and formally separate from the narrative flow. More than the emblematic scenes on the plot level, these intercalary chapters in Outer Dark parallel Holbein’s images in a structural sense, because both cycles represent parables on Death’s progress, and both represent types rather than individuals.

2This preliminary observation is made in order to suggest that Outer Dark is structured as a purely allegorical composition, and that it therefore cannot plausibly be considered a mimetic work of fiction. Admittedly, a certain allegorical quality of Outer Dark has always been acknowledged, as critics have commented that the novel’s “world is an allegory” (Davenport, “Gothic” 4), that “the timelessness of the story gives it a blurred Kafkaesque quality, verging on allegory” (Schafer 111), and that “the dreamlike setting and pace bring an almost medieval aura of allegory to the events” (Bell 33). The triune’s allegorical nature is also implied in epithets like “figures of time” (Grammer 35), “avenging angels” and “crazed furies” (Schafer 111), or “a mad variation on the Magi” (Leiter 91). To diagnose an allegorical aspect is not the same, however, as saying that the novel is principally defined by allegorical composition, which it is. In fact, Outer Dark is devoid of any sign for realism, except for the sur-realism of its gothic elements. The purpose of such a composition could be to use allegorical form to communicate a meta-narrative mood, or, in other words, to master the subject matter of the meta-narrative discourse with the help of a reiterative counter-discourse on the plot level. The subsequent discussion of the novel’s use of intertextuality will first position Outer Dark within the tradition of southern gothic fiction, then use this context to show how pastoral nostalgia—traditionally associated with southern pastoral fiction—lapses into a stylistic destruction of the genre of the southern pastoral. This conclusion will in turn suggest that in this sense Outer Dark propels traditional southern pastoralism to its logical, if worst, denouement.

3 Among other things, the argument will qualify certain Cassandra-calls made by scholars such as Walter Sullivan, lamenting the decline of southern pastoral literature. Having credited McCarthy as “a vastly talented writer” ( “Flowers” 660), Sullivan criticizes the lack of structure and scope in Outer Dark, the novel’s “confusion of the physical with the metaphysical, of fate with the solid realities of flesh and stone” ( “Flowers” 662). Elsewhere, Sullivan writes that recent southern literature “issues into a hidden wish for our own demise... for self-destruction, our quest for the death of the spirit which is the true and only death” (Death 124-25). This may be a valid point to make—as shall be seen—but it reflects primarily a frustrated mimetic reading of the text. A less dramatic and more precise analysis of Outer Dark would have revealed that the novel, rather than being absorbed by mindless “self-destruction,” is carefully composed as an allegorical twilight of the pastoral myth in the southern literary tradition.

1 The Southern Gothic Context

4The relevant formal aspects are those that define the novel as a gothic work of fiction. Generically speaking, Outer Dark is a gothic more than a pastoral novel even though its southern setting is marked by a rusticity bordering on the primitive. The paucity of realistic plot structures, the absence of verifiable references to time and place, and the ubiquity of horror renders the novel as gothic as the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, and Sullivan says as much:

So we move through a world of curiously contrived ferries, fat men who live in decaying houses, preachers who attempt to inspire bloodshed, criminals who kill for the joy of killing. The question is not whether these things taken separately exist, but rather what kind of world they come together to create, what kind of unity they make. And the answer is: none, they remain separate features of the surrealist landscape. ( “Flowers” 661)

5One could argue with equal legitimacy and equal pointlessness that “Jack and the Beanstalk” does not adequately reflect the facts of horticulture. And the answer to Sullivan’s question is: These features of the surrealist landscape do come together in a tightly knit unity of a fable. If one was to imagine an alternative to McCarthy’s way of writing, one could contrast it with Faulkner’s prose. While Faulkner’s use of grotesque or gothic elements fails to diminish the realism of settings, scenes and figures, Outer Dark rarely provides names, let alone satisfying profiles. They are grotesque in the manner of solitary gargoyles, woven into the overall text not so much as individuals in their own right but rather as typological variations on gothic archetypes. The tinker, for one, seems like an adaptation of the Wandering Jew;2 the triune like the Furies or Satan; Culla like Cain who “fears that every hand is turned against him” (Lask 33).3 Against the gothic background in Outer Dark, Grammer interprets the murdering triune as “avengers, apparently summoned up by the community’s, and particularly Culla and Rinthy’s sins” (38). Arnold writes, “It is as if his [Culla’s] own guilt—or his denial of his own guilt—has called these figures forth” (49).

6It has already been plausibly argued (cf. Arnold, Grammer) that the novel’s sense of evil is rooted in the traditional preoccupation of southern Gothicism with the moment when evil reenters the utopian pastoral community, that is, “the moment when a community organized as a refuge from history is forced to confront it” (Grammer 35). Yet the evil irrupting from within the pastoral world of Outer Dark mocks the very distinction between good and evil, between outside intrusion and civic strife.

7In respect to this dualism (and to morality as such), the principal difference between Outer Dark and Faulkner’s Light in August—the novel’s direct antecedent in many ways—is that the sense of evil in Faulkner’s novel is mediated by characters who, regardless of their fanatic quirks, seem plausible in their fundamentalism, such as the patriarchs Burden, McEachern, and Hines. Outer Dark, by contrast, is marked by a pure travesty of Calvinism. A superstitious sort of para-religion manifests itself when the satanic leader of the triune passes himself off as a “minister” (129), when the triune is described as having halos of “spurious sanctity” (3), or when the itinerant preacher delivers a sermon on cripples whose absurdity clearly parodies O’Connor’s sense of the grotesque: “Ever legless fool and old blind mess like you is a flower in the garden of God” (226). Strangely though, even as the pastoral world of Outer Dark is steeped in an epidemic of reciprocal violence on the plot level, the textual sense of evil remains vicarious. It is actually so all-pervading (it reveals itself even in expository phrases such as “the mute and windy heavens,” 33) that it points beyond the plot level, to the meta-narrative level of meaning.

2 Gothic Landscape as Psychological Inscape

8Among the constants of Gothicism that Kerr lists are “psychological interest and concern with the irrational and the unconscious, the dream side of the psyche; appalling situations; a Calvinistic Manichaean polarity of good and evil and/or ambivalence in the moral attitudes of the characters; the abandonment of realism as a major aim; the use of setting and atmosphere to create a mood” (6). Grotesque imagery functions as one of the principal devices to cause a “realistic displacement which conceals gothic structures” (Kerr 28), and grotesque aspects inform characters and setting everywhere in Outer Dark, such as the tinker ( “a small gnomic creature wreathed in a morass of grizzled hair,” 6), the supplicants ( “A delegation of human ruin... with blind eyes upturned and puckered stumps and leprous sores,” 5), the noseless crone ( “such long bat’s nostrils,” 57), the hermitic crone ( “the stooped and hooded anthropoid,” 108), the hog drovers ( “all hairyfaced and filthy and half toothless and their weathered chops lumpy with tobacco chews,” 220), and the infant at the center of the story (e.g. 231). The novel’s grotesque aesthetic discourages in itself a realistic reading because it situates the textual reality on the cusp between the material and the imaginary. Kerr (actually picking up an idea by Alfred Appel) links the grotesque in gothic fiction to “the breakdown of order into dream effects” (20):

The grotesque is characterized by a distortion of the external world, by the description of human beings in nonhuman terms, and by the displacement we associate with dreams. The infinite possibilities of the dream inform the grotesque at every turn, suspending the laws of proportion and symmetry: our deepest promptings are projected into the details of the scene—inscape as landscape. (21)

9This is important to bear in mind because some of the characters in Outer Dark seem to have been directly evoked by Culla’s dream on the opening pages of the novel: The “parson or what looked like one” (221) and the hog drovers, the blind preacher near the end who virtually retells that dream as if he had witnessed it. Foremost among the grotesques who resemble residual dream figures is Culla and Rinthy’s nameless child, whom Culla “would have taken... for some boneless cognate of his heart’s dread had the child not cried” (18). Introduced as “the nameless weight in her belly” (5), the child in fact personifies the burden of guilt that the incest leaves in Culla’s unconscious. More obviously, the triune’s “consubstantial monstrosity” (129) seems like the projection of a schizophrenic mind.

10Upon closer scrutiny, the surrealist quality in Outer Dark presents itself wherever the narrative flow is invaded by imagery fusing the immaterial (such as dream thought) with the material (such as setting). Textual evidence of a surrealist transfer of dream images to the plot level is given by the numerous comparisons of scenery to dreamscape. Culla sees the people in Well’s Station move “beneath the blinding heat like toilers in a dream” (134), he sees hanged men appear in the first light of day “alien and unreal like figures from a dream” (146), the “minktrapper materialized for him out of the glare of the sun like some trembling penitent” (125), and shoats run past him “like creatures in a dream” (219). The tinker “started in his traces like one wrenched from a trance” (184), and Rinthy “rose half tranced from the bed” because perhaps “some dream had moved her so” (211). Most notably, however, the triune is “endowed with a dream’s redundancy” (231).

11Kerr proposes “a direct relationship between Gothicism and surrealism” and defines surrealism as “the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association theretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of dream, and in the disinterested play of thought” (12). In Outer Dark, surrealist narration manifests itself in compositional incongruence. Incongruent figures, remindful of Culla’s dream, include the beehiver, the false reverend, the blind preacher; semantic incongruence occurs when Culla hears “no sound save a faint moaning like the wind but there was no wind” (231), when the leader remarks about his henchman “He’s close, but I keep at it” (178), when Rinthy watches “a huge horse emerging seared and whole from the sun’s eye” (212), or in the form of attributes such as “poisoned grass” (229). There is reason to believe that these surreal moments serve to project the evil (the story’s principal concern) out of their psychic realm and into the narrative landscape. Bell writes that “like a curse that he [Culla] has brought upon the world, he now has remade the world in his own blighted image,” and that “Eventually, there is hardly any significant difference, ontologically, between his dream life and the real world” (39). In fact, the insertion of surrealist imagery turns the representation of landscape in much of Outer Dark into an obvious representation of the inscape of Culla’s psyche.

12Hence, the surrealist aspects in Outer Dark seem to translate inner ruin into the ruinous aspects of a gothic landscape, such as the ruined houses, ruined people, ruined land. Among the negatively picturesque images are the descriptions of the crone’s house which “was grown with a rich velour of moss and lichen and brooded in a palpable miasma of rot” (109), the snake hunter’s house where “On the lower walls grew scalloped shelves of fungus and over the untrod parts of the floor lay a graygreen mold like rotting fur” (121-22), and the deserted cabin Culla uses for a night:

The floor was buckled and the walls seemed tottering and he could see nothing plane or plumb anywhere. There was a small window mortised crookedly into the logs of one wall, the sash hung with leather hinges. That and the long clayless chinks among the logs let in the waning light of this day and wind crossed the room with the steady cool pull of running water. There was a claymortared fireplace of flatless and illfitted fieldstone which bulged outward in the room with incipient collapse, a wagon spring for lintel, the hearth of poured mud hard and polished as stone. A serpentine poker. Two wooden bedsteads with tickings of husks and a halfbed with a mattress on which lay curled a dead cat leering with eyeless grimace, a caved and maggoty shape that gave off a faint dry putrescence above the reek of aged smoke. (195-96)

13This description constitutes a nature morte meant to reflect in microcosm both a desolate world and a desolate mind. Images of decay have always served to reflect pastoral nostalgia in southern literature. In Outer Dark, however, the setting is so implicated in the protagonists’ existential crisis that pastoral decay escalates into universal desolation. In fact, the surrealist adaptation of southern stock images seems to create a virtual southern microcosm.

14In this sense, Outer Dark does not just incorporate allegorical elements, but is structured as a pastoral fable from cover to cover. Protagonists Rinthy and Culla themselves seem to be allegorical agents, interchangeable in their abject sense of self, literally beside themselves with someone else’s grief. Plagued like fable creatures by an ulterior abjection, “The two principal characters of Outer Dark wander about as if in a maze that has no center to it or exit” (Bell 34). Arguably, the incestuous couple manifests symptoms of a narcissistic crisis. More than the doppelganger motif (that presents itself in the figures of the child, the mute gang member, and Rinthy) incest represents a primary form of narcissism, because “The sister is closest to the self; she is the narcissistic reflection the youth sees if he looks up from his own mirrored image” (Kerr 15). Functioning as Culla’s beatific alter ego, Rinthy hardly represents the potential restitution of his loss, yet she is invested with some aspects he lacks in his deracinated state, to wit, an unselfconscious disregard for the moral codex he is haunted by, and an ingenuous self-centeredness. In her grotesque state of grace these qualities make her seem innocent and virginal, though she is as abject and melancholy as Culla.

15Read as two avatars of a single subject, Rinthy and Culla come to represent melancholia in its two aspects of abjection and paranoia. Rinthy represents the abjection of loss and thwarted desire in her futile quest for her child and perhaps a home, whereas Culla personifies the attendant paranoia in his persistent reiteration of affects such as guilt, despair, and anxiety. It is his paranoia that surfaces in visions of mindless violence, which in turn come true in the triune’s deeds. Rinthy und Culla’s separate, if synchronous, quests illustrate “that want and aggressivity are chronologically separable but logically coextensive”:

To speak of want alone is to repudiate aggressivity in obsessional fashion; to speak of aggressivity alone, forgetting want, amounts to making transference paranoidal (Kristeva, Horror 39).

16Although the chance to reverse their abjection is repeatedly offered to both Rinthy and Culla,4 and is moreover suggested by the eventual disappearance of the triune, the narrator behind this composite psychograph does not intend to resolve the melancholic fates of the characters but to reiterate them indefinitely in allegoresis of his own pastoral melancholia.

3 The Symbolic Order of the Southern Pastoral

17While both melancholia and allegory mark responses to the experience of loss, “The abjection of self would be the culminating form of that experience of the subject to which it is revealed that all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being” (Kristeva, Horror 5). Exceeding even the comparable alienation of Joanna Burden and Joe Christmas in Light in August who “are essentially nomads, people on the move” (Bleikasten 314), the alienation of the siblings is absolute, matched only by that of the tinker. “They ain’t a soul in this world but what is a stranger to me” (29) says Rinthy; “I ain’t got sign one of kin on this earth” (207) says Culla; “I’ve not got soul one in this world save a old halfcrazy sister” (192-93) says the tinker, and these are the key sentences of the novel. Bell calls the text a “disturbing, powerful representation of not being at home in the world” (33). “The whole social atmosphere of Outer Dark is one of near-total estrangement” (Grammer 37) insofar as social convention is constantly broken, relations teeter on the brink of violence, and each encounter is a potential confrontation marked by phobia and paranoia.

18According to Lacanian psychoanalysis, abjection is brought on by the disintegration of the ego under the onslaught of the imaginary Dead Father, that is, of the symbolic order that “precedes and possesses me, and through such possession causes me to be. A possession previous to my advent” (Kristeva, Horror 10). Normally, the aspects of self lost with the subject’s entry into the symbolic order of language are abjected as the impossible memory of a primal unity, so that “I become a subject capable of dealing with objects only by virtue of having constituted a domain of the abject” (Boothby 65). The abject reemerges if negation of the loss gives way to the denial of negation and induces the melancholic’s endless pursuit of the lost object through compulsive repetition. That is, abjection of self is experienced by the subject “when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than abject” (Kristeva, Horror 5). A life led in abjection is a forfeited existence lived in exclusion from one’s own self.

19The loss at issue for Culla is that he leads the existence of a disenfranchised yeoman; unable to conform with the symbolic order of an allegorized Calvinism. His melancholy paranoia is induced by his inability to abide by the internalized code of the Dead Father, namely the role model of southern yeomanry. The role of the Dead Father can be elucidated with the help of an intertextual comparison of the siblings with Joe and Joanna in Light in August. The point is inspired by Bleikasten’s argument that “Joe’s and Joanna’s encounter is the fortuitous but fatal collision of two lives under the same curse, the same paternal malediction, and their affair the inevitable working out of two complementary self-destructive designs” (320). As Bleikasten elaborates, “The Father—especially the Dead Father—is always the one who names, separates, places, marks, and casts the spell, whether through his voice or his eyes” (319). Just as Joe and Joanna have internalized the paternal symbolic order to the point where it has eroded their own sense of self, self-abjection defines the state of Culla’s psyche (more so than Rinthy’s). In this sense, Culla’s inability to fix (30) or sell (56) his dead father’s rifle—phallic symbol of paternal omnipotence—would exemplify his psychic crisis. Culla’s failed identification with an absconding father figure ( “He’s dead,” 207) indicates his internalization of the patriarchal ethos which terrorizes his ego into abjection. The workings of the Thanatos are precisely this, the destruction not of the physical body but of the “imaginary form of the body that models the ego” (Boothby 39) by an absolutely powerful Other.

20In her discussion of the despondency permeating Dostoyevsky’s work Kristeva names suicide and terrorism as the “two solutions, both fatal, to suffering in Dostoyevsky—the ultimate veil of chaos and destruction” (Sun 186). But the terrorism visited upon the pastoral world of Outer Dark arguably enacts the melancholic auto-aggression of the narrator in the triune’s agency. While neither his willful consent to, nor his awareness of, the triune’s genesis is suggested by the text, Culla’s complicity with the novel’s sense of evil actually seems to call these sub-characters into being. Although no pact is signed, such complicity is invoked by the narrative mind which creates the characters, the pastoral world, and the terrorism inside this world, in the image of his own psyche. Outer Dark consequently represents a landscape of the narrative psyche, a “sparse and bitter land” (54) indeed. Since the narrator’s sense of pastoral has assumed such a degree of abjection that it seeks the desolation of the garden rather than accept and sublimate the loss of the pastoral dream, the narrative intention of Outer Dark must be to dismember southern pastoralism as such, and this out of a melancholia so profound that it constructs a sinister parable on the demise of a mythologeme out of its very iconography. The novel in effect refers to a narrative consciousness plagued by the abjection of a literary tradition.

4 Intertextual Leads

21The argument is substantiated by certain instances of direct intertextuality of Outer Dark with antecedent southern fiction, specifically with Light in August because these suggest McCarthy’s continuation of an older pastoralism for the purpose of destructing it. Light in August draws on diverse narrative elements to enrich a realistic narrative, whereas Outer Dark is structured like a book-length allegory working with pseudo-realistic conceits. But Lena Grove, for one, does bear the marks of an allegorical persona, because “Lena holds the novel together, enfolds it in her monumental serenity, makes is what it is: a story full of sound and fury set against a background of pastoral stillness, a tale of darkness fringed with light” (Bleikasten 275). Lena and Rinthy could be considered heliotropic sisters—Lena moving in the mystic light of August, Rinthy in an “agony of sunlight” (97). Both wear the color of the Madonna—dressed in “a shapeless garment of faded blue” (LIA 9) and “a blue dress” (OD 126), respectively. Lena is twenty (4-5), Rinthy “nineteen year old” (126). Both are orphaned, both are Ceres figures of pastoral fertility, yet Rinthy seems to be the very shadow of Lena.

The powerfully maternal Rinthy, hunting her “chap” and lactating helplessly, is of course a figure of great natural fecundity, the earth-as-mother who lies at the heart of the pastoral myth. Bell has pointed out that Rinthy is McCarthy’s version of Lena Grove, Faulkner’s footloose embodiment of the maternal (and pastoral, as her name implies) life force. But Rinthy is a dark and hopeless version of Lena, just as Outer Dark—the very title suggests it—is a dark and hopeless version of Light in August. (Grammer 38)5

22Rinthy’s positive maternal attributes are inverted into their worst possible counter-images. Her child is not only born out of wedlock but from an incestuous union. She is not just hunting its father but the child itself. Although she too meets with hospitality she is invariably prevented from accepting it. Although she is courted by a farmer in vaguely the same way Lena is by Byron Bunch, she steals away from “the dead and loveless house” (211) in the night. Instead of interrupting her quest like Lena she is doomed to perpetuate her hopeless errand. And rather than matching her peregrination with Lena’s adventurousness, she roams the countryside as a wayward stray. “Lost, she said. Yes I’m lost” (58), unlike Lena who marvels “My, my. A body does get around” (LIA 507).

23In short, while Lena personifies indeed the tranquil endurance of “pastoral stillness,” Rinthy’s grace is that of catatonia, and her refusal to overcome the loss of her child allegorizes the narrator’s melancholia, as does Culla’s refusal to confront his crisis. “Suffering unfurls its microcosm through the reverberations of characters. They are articulated as doubles, as in mirrors that magnify their melancholia to the point of violence and delirium” (Kristeva, Sun 257). Rinthy’s stylization as a type (rather than as a realistic figure) becomes apparent whenever her movements are compared to the mechanical motion of a doll. Examples abound: In the scene of her departure from home “She pirouetted slowly in the center of the room like a doll unwinding” (53). Other passages describe her as “doll-like” (210), as watching “with such doll’s eyes of painted china” (24) and moving “like a crippled marionette” (32). To stylize Rinthy into an allegorical agent whose suffering shows as “something half wild in her look” (155), something “half deranged” (151), therefore goes considerably farther than Lena’s portrayal as a realistic figure with allegorical aspects. A grotesque adaptation of Lena, Rinthy personifies the abjection of what is still quasi-virginal in Faulkner’s pastoralism. It attests to McCarthy’s craftsmanship that she seems nonetheless as real as she could not possibly be.

24Another intertextual back-reference links Rinthy with the bigoted grandmother in O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Having been shot to death by the Misfit, the old lady “half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky” (152). Rinthy is said to leave her home “turning her face up to the sky and bestowing upon it a smile all bland and burdenless as a child’s” (53). The analogy suggests that Rinthy is as free of moral bigotry in her abject state as the self-righteous grandmother is in death. The parallel is hardly incidental because the same story contains the murderous trio of the Misfit and his two sidekicks, who can be compared with the triune in Outer Dark. This analogy includes details such as the namelessness of the leaders and similarity of the lieutenants’ names: “Harmon” (OD 50) and “Hiram” (O’Connor 146), respectively. Prefiguring the triune’s leader, the Misfit is stylized as Satan by his name ( “Misfit” being evocative of the term “infidel”), by his black clothing, the “hearse-like automobile” (145) he drives, his confession that there is “No pleasure but meanness” (152), and the encyclopedia of the evil he has witnessed (149).6 Altogether, this intertextuality, though important, does little more than support the allegorical interpretation of the triune as evil incarnate, and establish the influence of O’Connor’s on McCarthy’s writing.

25The analogies with O’Connor’s novel The Violent Bear It Away, where instances of allegoresis abound, are infinitely more important. Many of the intertextual links relate in turn to biblical contents, such as the baptism of little Bishop in O’Connor’s novel. Like the siblings’ child in Outer Dark, Bishop is retarded, and not unlike the child’s murder in a travesty of the Eucharist, Bishop is murdered in a travestied baptism. Moreover, Bishop is stylized into an allegorical Christ child, and this in turn supports an equal reading of the child in Outer Dark: Apart from his tell-tale first name, Bishop’s eyes are “clear, as if the other side of them went down and down into two pools of light” (O’Connor 344); he was “formed in the image and likeness of God;” Rayber, his father, feels an epiphanic, “horrifying love” toward the boy (401); and the landlady of the lodge reprimands Tarwater for his behavior toward Bishop, “as if he had profaned the holy” (427). Just like the sacrificial death of Culla’s child, the climactic sacrifice of Bishop fails to bring off the desired catharsis, and despite the novel’s redemptive closing Tarwater continues to live and travel in his alienated state not unlike Culla: “His singed eyes, black in their deep sockets, seemed already to envision the fate that awaited him but he moved steadily on” (O’Connor 479).

26The most important analogy to Outer Dark, however, consists of O’Connor’s creation of a split point of view in The Violent Bear It Away when stylizing the figure of the invisible stranger-turned-friend patently as a schizophrenic projection by Tarwater’s mind. Although Tarwater’s ‘friend’ speaks in the voice of reason throughout most of the novel he is identified as the devil when the great-uncle’s prophecy “that the devil is always going to be offering to assist [you], to give you a smoke or a drink or a ride, and to ask you your bidnis” (O’Connor 367) is literally fulfilled: Tarwater’s ‘friend’ materializes in the shape of a realistic character to offer him ride, drink, smoke; and to question, then trick and rape him. He is recognizable as the ‘friend’ incarnate because earlier descriptions of the ‘friend’—itemizing “a panama hat” (352), “violet eyes” (462), and a “shadow-like” (461) appearance—are repeated in the introduction of the homosexual rapist:

The person who had picked him up was a pale, lean, old-looking young man with deep hollows under his cheekbones. He had on a lavender shirt and a thin black suit and a panama hat. His lips were as white as the cigaret that hung limply from one side of his mouth. His eyes were the same color as his shirt. (469; emphasis added; one has to keep in mind that violet and lavender designate the same hue.)

27This diabolic mentor—whose imagined voice has instigated Tarwater against his uncle Rayber and his great-uncle Mason, and coached Tarwater through his murder of Bishop—finally materializes to assault Tarwater physically, and by doing so facilitates understanding of not just The Violent Bear It Away, but of Outer Dark too, as a purely allegorical composition. The helpful difference consists in the circumstance that, even though both novels contain allegorical agents of evil, The Violent Bear It Away at first restricts the evil agency to a projection originating inside a schizophrenic mind in order to preserve the impression of realistic narration, but eventually uses a non-imaginary character to personify this agency. After this point in the story, O’Connor’s narrative becomes predominantly allegorical, because to stylize a figment of the imagination patently and arbitrarily into a plot level persona, and to include this persona in the plot action, contradicts the convention of disinterestedness in realistic fiction. But as it traces the origin of the allegorical Satan figure back to Tarwater’s mind, the use of allegoresis in O’Connor’s novel clearly supports the representation of Tarwater’s crisis.

28If the figure of the friend-turned-stranger has (prior to its entrance on the plot level as a de facto character) no intra-textual existence outside Tarwater’s schizophrenic cognition, and if the imaginary voice of evil (heard only by Tarwater) is later committed by the narrator to the plot action as an allegorical agent without Tarwater’s awareness of it and in a way that causes Tarwater to be physically victimized by this same agent, then Tarwater’s projection of this figure and the autonomous materializing of this same figure obviously represent the narrator’s cosmogonic manipulation of the textual reality. As the novel’s allegoresis proceeds openly, that is, without hiding its manipulative design from the reader, the allegorical intention is easily identified as such. The point is that allegoresis in Outer Dark operates similarly, if less conspicuously, in its allegoresis of evil agency when it does introduce the triune in formally separate inter-chapters but shapes them into quasi-realistic characters from the start. Even though the text clearly defines them as “parodic figures” (35), as typological variations on the furies, their origin in Culla’s psychic crisis and their projection as plot level agents (rather than as schizophrenic symptoms) are not readily identifiable. Nor is it easy to decode the desolation of the novel’s pastoral world as a pure allegory on the narrator’s pastoral melancholia, and finally as a parable on the abject vanity of southern pastoralism as such. But this is precisely the point: The pastoral wasteland of Outer Dark is a willful travesty of southern pastoralism.

5 The Outer Dark of a Literary Cliché

29In view of this point, the novel’s intertextuality with Light in August becomes highly meaningful. Like Outer Dark, Faulkner’s novel does contain a bleak pastoral aspect in its nocturnal Gothicism and when it visualizes “profound and peaceful desolation” (LIA 5). But Lena, for one, personifies an unqualified affirmation of pastoral vitality, and pastoral hope in general remains undiminished. So the principal difference between Light in August, for one, and Outer Dark is not in essence but in degree of allegorizing and of melancholia. Much the same can be said in regard to McCarthy’s relation to traditional southern Gothicism as a whole. That the myth of southern pastoralism (as a literary cliché) constitutes the novel’s true realm of the abject is illustrated by microcosmic instances such as the following, describing a still life of southern pastoralism frozen in time and space:

People were moving from shade to shade beneath the store awnings and across the bright noon clay with leaden steps, moving beneath the blinding heat like toilers in a dream stunned and without purpose. The first man he came upon that was not caught up in this listless tableau was a teamster fitting a wheel. (134-35)

30The narrator’s retrospective gaze here perceives the narrative present as an anachronism, as something that will always already have passed. Melancholy discourse is marked by its sense of monumental, mythic time, and when Bleikasten writes about Light in August that “Lena comes to us, comes back to us from the plumbless depths of a time before time, prior to the nightmare of history, a time slow and simple” (275), he also captures Rinthy:

Emaciate and blinking and with the wind among her rags she looked like something replevied by grim miracle from the ground and sent with tattered windings and halt corporeality into the agony of sunlight. Butterflies attended her and birds dusting in the road did not fly up when she passed. She hummed to herself as she went some child’s song from an old dead time. (OD 97-98)

31Like a revenant, Rinthy personifies at once pastoral abjection and pastoral bliss, and the discrepancy between the two extremes could hardly be greater.

32Nor could the meta-narrative sense of loss ( “an old dead time”) be more specific, because the imagery of the passage, unwarranted by context, suggests that not an intra-textual past but the intertextual past (the literary imagination of the southern pastoral) has become the object of retrospective fixation. What Kristeva writes about the melancholic’s sense of time certainly applies to this and comparable emblems in McCarthy’s narrative which inscribe melancholy retrospection into an allegorical pastiche of pastoral déjà vues:

As the time in which we live is the time of our discourse, the alien, retarded, or vanishing speech of melancholy people leads them to live within a skewed time sense. It does not pass by, the before/after notion does not rule it, does not direct it from a past toward a goal.... Riveted to the past, regressing to the paradise or inferno of an unsurpassable experience, melancholy persons manifest a strange memory: everything has gone by, they seem to say, but I am faithful to those bygone days, I am nailed down to them, no revolution is possible, there is no future. (Sun 60)

33McCarthy’s work which at first glance “seems to have very little to do with southern literary tradition” (Grammer 30) in fact constitutes a (con) temporary apex of that tradition. Having reworked the southern pastoral into a vision darker than the novel’s literary antecedents by reproducing in it the narrator’s, not just the characters’, trauma, Outer Dark takes the psychological tendency of the Faulkner tradition to extremes. It transcends that literary tradition by reducing it to the function of a stage set on which the death of southern pastoralism itself is dramatized.

Bibliographie

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Works cited

Arnold, Edwin T. “Naming, Knowing and Nothingness: McCarthy’s Moral Parables.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Revised edition. Ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999. 45-69.

Bell, Vereen M. The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1988.

10.2307/j.ctt1zxxzcc :

Bleikasten, André. The Ink of Melancholy. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.

Boothby, Richard. Death and Desire. Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan’s Return to Freud. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Coles, Robert. “The Empty Road.” New Yorker 45 (22 Mar. 1969): 133-39.

Davenport, Guy. “Appalachian Gothic.” New York Times 29 Sep. 1968, sec. 7: 4.

Faulkner, William. Light in August. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Grammer, John M. “A Thing Against Which Time Will Not Prevail: Pastoral and History in Cormac McCarthy’s South.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Revised edition. Ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999. 29-44.

Kerr, Elisabeth M. William Faulkner’s Gothic Domain. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1979.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun. Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.

Lask, Thomas. “Southern Gothic.” New York Times 23 Sep. 1968: L33.

Leiter, Robert. “Child of God.” Commonweal 100.4 (29 Mar. 1974): 90-92.

McCarthy, Cormac. Outer Dark. New York: Vintage, 1993 (orig. pub. 1968).

O’Connor, Flannery. Collected Works. New York: Library of America, 1988.

Schafer, William J. “Cormac McCarthy: The Hard Wages of Original Sin.” Appalachian Journal 4 (Winter 1977): 105-19.

Sullivan, Walter. “‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone?’ Part II: The Novel in the Gnostic Twilight.” Sewanee Review 78.4 (Fall 1970): 654-64.

Sullivan, Walter. Death By Melancholy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1972.

Winkels, Hubert. “Kalt wie ein böses Märchen.” Tagesanzeiger (Zurich) 23 Aug. 1994: 74.

Notes de bas de page

1 Grammer argues that Outer Dark “is a kind of Paradise Lost” and that Culla and Rinthy are “in a sense the first citizens... of their dying pastoral world” (38). In evidence of the Adam-and-Eve analogy one could list the harangues on snakes in Outer Dark (110) and by the snake hunter (124), as well as figurative references to snakes, such as the “serpent tongue of flame” (181) of the triune campfire, or the constellation of “the waterserpent (211) under which Rinthy flees into the night.

2 The tinker also resembles the type of the Flying Dutchman, down to the approximation of his name to ‘Dutch’: “They is one [tinker] stocks here. Name of Deitch” (75). Moreover, the tinker can and has been read (Coles 138) as a grotesque parody of the sewing machine agent V. K. Ratliff in Faulkner’s The Hamlet.

3 Rinthy shares Culla’s Cain-like outcast status and says so: “I don’t live nowheres no more, she said. I never did much. I just go around huntin my chap. That’s about all I do any more” (156). She also is party to Culla’s fear: “I was always scared. Even when they wasn’t nobody bein murdered nowheres” (116).

4 Among chances for social reintegration are Rinthy’s opportunities to hire out as a “gardener” (98; note the meaning within the pastoral context) or to join a farmer’s household (209-11), and Culla’s opportunities to trade the boots with the beehiver in order to redeem the theft (80) or to work for the snake hunter (125).

5 Interestingly, Bleikastein mentions that “Dark House” was the title originally chosen for this novel (Light in August), yet even in its absence it is silently at work in the text.

6 Being shirtless (like the triune’s leader, OD 95), the Misfit also resembles the tarot card “The Devil,” an analogy which would seem farfetched if it was not for the restaurant “The Tower” (O’Connor 140) whose name matches the tarot card of destruction of that name, and the out-of-place presence of the monkey who flees from the feisty children and who is archetypically synonymous with “The Fool,” the tarot card of the trickster. The references to the tarot moreover vindicate the typological reading of the story.


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