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Cormac McCarthy: Restless Seekers

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SOURCE: Cawelti, John G. “Cormac McCarthy: Restless Seekers.” In Southern Writers at Century's End, edited by Jeffrey J. Folks and James A. Perkins, pp. 164-76. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1997.

[In the following essay, Cawelti presents an overview of Cormac McCarthy's career, stressing that his works connect the new Western and the new Southern literature genres through a concern for a sense of the failure of white American culture.]

Southerners have a favorite set of self-images involving associations with stability, tradition, and dedication to local communities, all the symbology of “down-home.” But in fact the South was founded by a horde of restless seekers who left their home places behind them in pursuit of a plethora of dreams: wealth and grandeur, religious salvation, dreams of utopia, or all three in various combinations. Faulkner understood this well, and two of his most significant characters, Thomas Sutpen and Flem Snopes, represent different generations of poor whites seeking to rise in the world. Even Faulkner's great aristocratic families, the Sartorises, the Compsons, and the McCaslins, were founded by such pilgrims.

These men and women were driven by a restlessness and desperation of spirit that urged them on to glorious accomplishment or catastrophic destruction. Such extremities have also been a fundamental part of Southern culture and history. From the beginning, a key dynamic of Southern evangelical Protestantism featured saintly figures like Billy Graham vying for control of the Southern conscience with men athirst for wealth, lust, and power like Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and Pat Robertson. The drive toward extremes may also account for the way in which Southern literature has been pervaded by a fascination with the gothic and the grotesque, plumbing the lower depths of society as well as fantasizing about chivalry and nobility. Flannery O'Connor, generally recognized as the most important Southern writer of the generation between the age of Faulkner and the present, was deeply imbued with this fascination as her parables of redemption and damnation in a modernizing South reveal. The most important contemporary inheritor of this stream of Southern literature and culture is a man many consider the most important living Southern writer, Cormac McCarthy.

McCarthy has developed in a very complex fashion, embarking in the last two decades on an almost completely new set of literary ventures, marked by his own restless quest from Knoxville, Tennessee, to El Paso, Texas, from the heart of the South to the edges of the West. In this way, McCarthy not only exemplifies some important aspects of the Southern identity as it is reshaping itself in the era of the Sunbelt, but in a deeper sense he can be seen as a postmodern avatar of that restless drive toward the West that has been a key motive in Southern culture since the first long hunters crossed the Appalachians in search of more game and the plantations began their long push from the Tidewater through the deep South to the plains of Texas.

McCarthy's literary journey embodies this great migration in mythical terms. In his first three novels, The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), and Child of God (1973), the protagonists are mountaineers driven or drawn out of their isolated home places into the modern world. Suttree, published in 1979, was McCarthy's most ambitious novel up to that time and it was also, as it turned out, his valediction to the middle South; for with his next novel, Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West (1985), McCarthy set forth on the fictional western quest that would soon lead to the first two novels of his announced “Border Trilogy,” All the Pretty Horses (1992) and The Crossing (1994). The last two novels not only rise out of the Southern tradition, but are major reinventions of the Western, reminding us how the great tradition of the modern Western began when a Baltimorean went to Wyoming to recover his health and came back with a novel called The Virginian (1902), an epic account of a former Southerner's heroic encounter with badmen (and a New England schoolmarm) in the Wild West.

As McCarthy develops his mythos of the pilgrimage through the fictional world of his imagination, we realize that such quests are never simple. It is often difficult to tell whether McCarthy's seekers are mainly driven by something they flee or drawn by something they seek. Is their quest best defined in terms of a journey through space or into the soul? Is this journey best understood as moving into the future or into the past? Is it toward salvation or damnation? Are these mysterious quests ultimately as incomprehensible as life itself, or is there, in the end, some point to it all? One of the fascinating things about McCarthy is that the quest continues but each new book slightly shifts the grounds traversed by its predecessors. He too still seems to be engaged by the very quest he writes about with such mystery and passion.

Suttree is McCarthy's longest and most ambitious novel to date. It is also, along with Blood Meridian, a major work of culmination and transition in his career. It is in this novel that McCarthy says his symbolic farewell to the South and begins his move from gothic world of the Southern literary tradition to the leaner, more action-filled style of the Western. As a novel, Suttree is a culmination and transformation of literary modernism as well as of important aspects of its Southern inheritance. The McCarthy Home Page on the World Wide Web likens Suttree to Joyce's Ulysses—“the novel's evocation of Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses, is often palpable”—with Suttree “like some latterday Bloom” and Knoxville as a Southern version of “dear, dirty Dublin.” There's certainly some truth in this assertion,1 but McCarthy's most direct predecessors are much closer. McCarthy himself offers homage to the greatest Southern modernist by making Suttree's very name allude to one of Faulkner's most important restless seekers, Thomas Sutpen. But Suttree is in some ways more like Henry than Thomas Sutpen, a latter-day revenant to the family home and the scene of the crime, though it's not at all clear what the crime is. However, the most direct prototype of Suttree is Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood. Like an inverted Hazel Motes, Suttree is unwillingly driven toward a goal he does not want to seek. In addition, he is plagued by a sort of disciple whose penchant for the subhuman world takes Enoch Emery's gorilla suit several steps further and includes sexual intercourse with watermelons, a bizarre pursuit of pigs, and an explosion in the Knoxville sewers. Suttree even has relationships with women that are eerily reminiscent of Hazel's involvements with Leora Watts and Sabbath Lily Hawks. Suttree's Knoxville is as much a variation of O'Connor's Taulkinham as it is of Joyce's Dublin.

Like O'Connor's major characters, Suttree is trapped in a world that has lost the sense of the presence of God. However, O'Connor's devout if offbeat Catholicism leads her to frame her stories of modern alienation by constantly hinting that, if we can look beyond the deceptive lights of the modern city, we can always see that “the black sky was underpinned with long silverstreaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands and thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all time to complete” (Wise Blood 24).

In O'Connor's world it is always possible for the seeker to encounter transcendence. Sometimes even a person who is not actually seeking, like Ruby Turpin in the story “Revelation,” is gifted with a moment of grace. McCarthy was raised a Catholic, but in his cosmos the audience sits in an empty and decaying theater and the minstrel show is long over. There's nothing left but death and silence. Whatever ultimate meaning there may or may not be can be summed up only in such enigmatic axioms as “ruder forms survive.”

The rest indeed is silence. It has begun to rain. … Faint summer lightning far downriver. A curtain is rising on the western world. A fine rain of soot, dead beetles, anonymous small bones. The audience sits webbed in dust. Within the gutted sockets of the interlocutor's skull a spider sleeps and the jointed ruins of the hanged fool dangle from the flies, bone pendulum in motley. Fourfooted shapes go to and fro over the boards. Ruder forms survive.

[Suttree 5]

Suttree takes place in Knoxville in the early 1950s, a city on the verge of dramatic changes.2 The novel ends in 1955 with the tearing down of the old slums in McAnally Flats in order to construct a new expressway, symbolizing Knoxville's hopeful participation in the Sunbelt South with its increasing commercial and industrial linkages to the rest of the country. However, the novel is not primarily concerned with the impinging of modernization on a traditional culture as it might have been had it been written by Bobbie Ann Mason, Lee Smith, Wendell Berry, or any number of other contemporary Southern writers. McCarthy chooses instead to deal with a protagonist and a group of characters whose impoverished marginality makes the new developments wholly irrelevant to them until they are suddenly dispossessed of the decaying area of the city where they live. The inhabitants of McAnally Flats form a grotesque community of exiles and escapees from the modern social order. Suttree is temporarily at home with the anarchic drunkards and grotesque thieves and madmen who live on the flats and on the waste lands along the floodplain of the Tennessee River. Deeply wounded in spirit and a restless seeker himself, Suttree is a kind of fisher king of this community of waste land outcasts. Though scion of a respectable old family, he has left the upper-middle-class world behind and become a derelict fisherman, selling carp and catfish he takes from the river to local butchers.

Yet Suttree is only hanging on in Knoxville, living marginally on its decaying fringes, held by a few residual family ties and by his loyalty to the fellow outcasts and rebels he has met along the river. Everything seems to conspire against his establishing any lasting relationships: his friends are killed by the police, hauled off to prison, or become victims of exposure and alcoholism; a perversely idyllic love affair with a beautiful girl he meets while catching mussels upriver ends tragically when his lover is killed in a rockslide; he almost settles down with a prostitute from Chicago, but just as things are going very well for them she goes violently insane and Suttree has to run for his life; finally, Suttree himself contracts typhoid fever and nearly dies. When he recovers, it is as if he has been inversely born again and everything in his former life has become dead for him. As the novel ends, Suttree passes the site of his former riverside shanty, now the construction site of a new expressway; a car stops for him, though he has not lifted a hand to signal it, and he is gone.

Whether Suttree's incessant seeking is primarily a quest for something beyond or a flight from the demons that haunt him is never fully clear. In fact, at the level of McCarthy's narrative quest and flight, seeking and running away seem to be interchangeable aspects of the same desperation of spirit. The source of this despair is McCarthy's overpowering sense of the brevity, fragility, and impermanence of human order in face of the vast but profoundly beautiful abyss of the cosmos. Above all, McCarthy's narrative gives us a sense of the macroscopic and microscopic, of the reality beyond human culture, the truth of “things known raw, unshaped by the construction of a mind obsessed with form” (427). In sudden flashes his characters reveal a primordial savagery that lurks beneath the surface of civilized society, as if “they could have been some band of stone age folk washed up out of an atavistic dream” (358). Suttree, more than most of the other characters, seems possessed with this sense of ultimate insecurity that pierces him at any moment when he lets his guard down: “he lay on his back in the gravel, the earth's core sucking his bones, a moment's giddy vertigo with this illusion of falling outward through blue and windy space, over the offside of the planet, hurtling through the high thin cirrus” (286).

Through McCarthy's vision we see that it is not the thriving New South city but the outcasts' “encampment of the damned” that is closer to reality, because it reveals the truth of man's folly and mortality: “this city constructed on no known paradigm, a mongrel architecture reading back through the works of man in a brief delineation of the aberrant disordered and mad” (3). In this world the most permanent and lyrical thing is decay, and any belief in permanence is delusion and madness. McCarthy is a veritable Tolstoy of Trash, and his pervasive and redolent poetry of rubble, garbage, and detritus are an ode to the haunting but futile beauty of the brevity and emptiness of human accomplishment against the vast geological panorama of rocks and stars.

However much he may reflect certain aspects of the Eliotic wasteland version of the grail legend, Cormac McCarthy's Suttree is no longer a Christian, nor is the possibility of Christian revelation held out to him, as is the case with Flannery O'Connor's characters. In one especially poignant scene, Suttree wanders into the unused Catholic school where he once studied, and there at this “derelict school for lechers” he finds his old desk and sits at it for a while before he notices a pathetic figure standing in the door of “this old bedroom in this old house where he'd been taught a sort of christian witchcraft.” The figure is an old priest who still apparently lives in the deserted school. But there is no contact and no word. “When he came past the stairway the priest was mounted on the first landing like a piece of statuary. A catatonic shaman who spoke no word at all. Suttree went out the way that he'd come in, crossing the grass toward the lights of the street. When he looked back he could see the shape of the priest in the baywindow watching like a paper priest in a pulpit or a prophet sealed in glass” (304-5).

In Suttree, McCarthy's world is that of a scientific rather than a religious millenialist, though the biblical overtones of his novel are at times almost overwhelming. McCarthy views human life from the perspective of eternity, yet his version of eternity is the cosmic, geological, and biological immensity that derives from a purely naturalistic vision of the universe. In a way his characters, like O'Connor's, are “god-haunted,” and his novels are secular allegories of driven souls fleeing the devil and seeking salvation in a realm across the borders of human good and evil where it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between the holy and the diabolical. This apocalyptic sense, with its implications of violence and destruction, is one aspect of the tradition of extreme individualism in religion and personal violence which John Shelton Reed identifies as a central component of the “enduring South,” and which, he suggests, may be becoming an even more important characteristic of Southern culture in the postmodern era.3

Though he is haunted by the absence of God from the moment he first appears as a fisherman on the horribly polluted Tennessee River until he shakes the dust of Knoxville from his feet, Suttree has one significant moment of revelation during a trek up into the mountains in his second year on the river. This restless trip becomes a vision quest as Suttree gets increasingly lost and fatigue and hunger undercut his sense not only of where he is but of how long he has been there. Finally a storm that seems to have been following him for days breaks over him, and as he “crouched like an ape in the dark under the eaves of a slate bluff and watched the lightning” he has a vision of the world as a bizarre witches' sabbath with all the eras of evolutionary history mixed together:

The storm moved off to the north. Suttree heard laughter and sounds of carnival. He saw with a madman's clarity the perishability of his flesh. Illbedowered harlots were calling from small porches in the night, in their gaudy rags like dolls panoplied out of a dirty stream. And along the little ways in the rain and lightning came a troupe of squalid merrymakers bearing a caged wivern on shoulderpoles and other alchemical game, chimeras and cacodemons skewered up on boarspears and a pharmacopeia of hellish condiments adorning a trestle and toted by trolls with an eldern gnome for guidon who shouted foul oaths from his mouthhole and a piper who piped a pipe of ploverbone and wore on his hip a glass flasket of some smoking fuel that yawed within viscid as quicksilver. A mesosaur followed above on a string like a fourlegged garfish helium filled. A tattered gonfalon embroidered with stars now extinct. Nemoral halfworld inhabitants, figures in buffoon's motley, a gross and blueback foetus clopping along in brogues and toga. Attendants attend. Suttree watched these puckish revelers pass with a half grin of wry doubt. Dark closed about him.

[287-88]

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? This vision might serve as a symbolic prophecy of the things experienced by the protagonists of McCarthy's next three novels. For Suttree, his final year on the river brings “a season of death and epidemic violence” (416). Increasingly he feels the coming of the hunter who in some mysterious way has been dogging his steps from the beginning. Finally the destruction of McAnally Flats, the one place in Knoxville he has been able to live in, drives him off the river and onto the road, where “out across the land the lightwires and road rails were going and the telephone lines with voices shuttling on like souls” (471).

Like his own protagonist, Cormac McCarthy pulled up stakes in Knoxville, leaving there in 1976, around the same time he was completing Suttree, and made a major geographical and creative move to the Southwest, settling in El Paso, Texas, which stands on the border between America and Mexico. This symbolic geographical location was the point of departure for McCarthy's next three novels. The book in which McCarthy began his own literary pilgrimage from Tennessee to West Texas is the extraordinary Blood Meridian, which combines a nightmarish series of events redolent of Southern Gothic with an anti-heroic quest set in Mexico and the future American Southwest. In some ways a strange sequel to Huckleberry Finn and in others, if one can imagine such a contradiction, a pre-Western post-Western, Blood Meridian unites the nineteenth-century tradition of western historical fiction springing from Cooper with a postmodernist vision of madness and chaos.4 It is about the quest-initiation of a young man from Tennessee, known only as “the kid” or “he,” who runs away from home in 1841 and eventually wanders westward. He becomes a member of a gang of outlaws and thieves who work the Texas-Mexico borderlands killing Indians and anyone else they think they can plunder.

The world this unnamed young man enters is a chaotic borderland, in both geographical and historical senses. It is the literal border between the United States and Mexico just after the Mexican War, when the definition of national frontiers remained in chaos and much of the land was still occupied by Native Americans hostile to both governments. Historically, the novel covers the period when the modern world first impinged upon the vast spaces of the great Southwest. The story of Blood Meridian is not, however, that of the traditional Western, in which heroic pioneers bring civilization to a savage wilderness. On the contrary, what the marauding Glanton gang brings to the borderlands is, if anything, more brutal and savage than the ethos of the violent peoples it encounters and seeks to exterminate.5 The novel is as much about the twilight of civilization as its dawning.

Like many restless and alienated young men, the kid embarks on his quest looking for adventure and fortune. What he finds everywhere is horror and violence. His wanderings might serve as a nineteenth-century paradigm for the young men whose desperate quests across the border in the aftermath of World War II were the subject of McCarthy's next two “Western” novels.

McCarthy's “Western” fiction, like the transitional Blood Meridian, tells a story characteristic of much contemporary Western fiction: a young man's initiation into manhood. The Western version of this archetypal theme is very often connected, as were many novels of the Southern Renascence and McCarthy's own “Southern” fiction, with a deep sense of belatedness and loss, as if the world no longer offers young men the possibilities and the satisfactions of earlier times. Larry McMurtry created an important contemporary version of this story in his two early novels of Thalia, Texas, Horseman, Pass By (1961) and The Last Picture Show (1966). In Horseman, Pass By, the young narrator feels a deep sense of loss: “Things used to be better around here. … I feel like I want something back” (123). And loss does come to characterize young Lonnie's world when his beloved grandfather's diseased cattle must be destroyed and the grandfather himself is shot after being terribly hurt in an accident. The Last Picture Show ends with the closing of Thalia's one movie theater and with it the mythic dream of the Old West, which inspired so many of the pictures shown there. Peter Bogdanovich effectively ended his film of the novel with the great scene from Howard Hawks's Western Red River (1947), in which John Wayne sets off on the first great cattle drive from Texas. In contrast to this heroic moment, the young people of Thalia are lost in the vacuous emptiness of a depressed oil boomtown.

This sense of the end of the heroic West haunts such major works of the new Western fiction as Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It (1976), in which an old man, haunted by memories of his long-dead father and brother and of the fishing they shared, still broods about his inability to save his brother from the violence that destroyed him. In other stories, Maclean evokes a lost world of skill with tools and heroic physical labor and shows how powerful an experience it was to be initiated into such a world. Like the mythical Western, these works celebrate a West that is largely gone, but unlike the traditional tales of wild cow-towns and cattle drives, outlaws and marshals, gunfighters and schoolmarms that populated the nation's imagined West, these stories celebrate the heroism not of gunfighters but of loggers, miners, forest service crews, and firefighters, those ordinary people who built the West and then saw it transformed into something else.

McCarthy has rapidly made himself a central figure in this literary tradition. The two novels of his Border Trilogy are among the richest and most complex treatments of the Western themes of initiation, belatedness, and frontiers. They transmute the mythical fantasy world of wild Western gunfighters, outlaws, and savage Indians into the last remnant of an age-old world of traditional work in which men are part of the unity of life and find great fulfillment in their actions because these actions are integral with horses and the rest of nature. Horses, which have been man's primary instrument in the use of nature and the creation of culture for centuries, are, as the novel's title would suggest, the symbol of a traditional unity between man and the world that is being increasingly destroyed by modern technology and industrialism. As McCarthy portrays it, West Texas, once one of the last bastions of traditional pastoralism in America, has become a wasteland of oil derricks.

Like McMurtry's earlier work, McCarthy's 1992 National Book Award winner All the Pretty Horses begins in a depressed West Texas in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Its protagonist, John Grady Cole, is sixteen years old and very much alone in the world. His father is separated from his mother and is slowly dying from a condition incurred in a prison camp during the war. Cole's grandfather is a rancher and Cole himself, loving horses and ranching, would like nothing better than to continue the ranch, but the old man dies and Cole's mother plans to sell the family ranch and leave the area. To continue the work he loves, Cole crosses the border into Mexico with a young friend, and the two find work on a large hacienda where the traditional work with horses and cattle is still carried on.

This momentary recovery of paradise is disrupted, however, when Cole falls desperately in love with the daughter of the great hacienda's proprietor. When she returns his love and the two embark on a passionate affair, her powerful family has Cole wrongfully arrested. After being nearly killed in a Mexican prison, Cole is freed when his lover promises never to see him again. The last section of the novel deals with Cole's revenge on the corrupt Mexican policeman who has betrayed him and stolen his horses. Finally, hardened and matured by his ordeal and deeply saddened by the loss of his love and his encounters with death, Cole returns to Texas.

The Texas he finds is on the verge of the postwar oil boom that will utterly destroy the traditional cattle culture, the same process further portrayed by McMurtry in his series of Thalia novels and the background for television's popular Western soap opera Dallas. While the traditional culture still exists in the late 1940s on the great haciendas of Mexico, it too is on borrowed time. It is significant that the wealthy hacendado of McCarthy's novel keeps his ranch more as a hobby than a way of life and uses an airplane to fly back and forth between the hacienda and his other life in Mexico City.

John Grady Cole is not only a master of horses but something of a visionary as well and the story is punctuated by his dreams of an eternal paradise where there are always wild horses holding out hope for man's redemption. “That night as he lay in his cot he could hear music from the house and as he was drifting to sleep his thoughts were of horses and of the open country and of horses. Horses still wild on the mesa who'd never seen a man afoot and who knew nothing of him or his life yet in whose souls he would come to reside forever” (117-18).

One of the most striking moments in the novel comes in a conversation between Cole, his young friend Rawlins, and an old man who symbolizes the traditional wisdom of the world of natural work. It is this old man who expresses most clearly the full spiritual significance of horses in this traditional vision of the world:

Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that man can be understood at all was probably an illusion. Rawlins asked him in his bad spanish if there was a heaven for horses but he shook his head and said that a horse had no need of heaven. Finally John Grady asked him if it were not true that should all horses vanish from the face of the earth the soul of the horse would not also perish for there would be nothing out of which to replenish it but the old man only said that it was pointless to speak of there being no horses in the world for God would not permit such a thing.

[111]

The most important thing John Grady Cole must learn in the process of his initiation into mature life is the hardest for him to accept: that such a world no longer exists for him. The Mexican hacienda is for him a Paradise Lost. Even in Mexico, the modern world of politics and revolution, technology and cities is eroding and destroying the traditions of the countryside, while in the Texas to which he must return, the only vestiges of the traditional world of man and nature are in the few remaining Indian encampments in the midst of the oil fields:

In four days' riding he crossed the Pecos at Iraan Texas and rode up out of the river breaks where the pumpjacks in the Yates Field ranged against the skyline rose and dipped like mechanical birds. Like great primitive birds welded up out of iron by hearsay in a land perhaps where such birds once had been. At that time there were still indians camped on the western plains and late in the day he passed in his riding a scattered group of their wickiups propped upon that scoured and trembling waste. They were perhaps a quarter mile to the north, just huts made from poles and brush with a few goathides draped across them. The indians stood watching him. He could see that none of them spoke among themselves or commented on his riding there nor did they raise a hand in greeting or call out to him. They had no curiosity about him at all. As if they knew all that they needed to know. They stood and watched him pass and watched him vanish upon that landscape solely because he was passing. Solely because he could vanish.

[301]

In this profoundly elegiac conclusion McCarthy evokes that mythical Western scene of the hero riding off into the sunset, but for John Grady Cole there is no more mythical world to cross over into, there is only “the darkening land, the world to come” (302).

The Crossing, second volume of the Border Trilogy, tells a story that has many similarities to All the Pretty Horses. It too involves the heroic quest of a young man who seeks something he never fully understands and, in the end, discovers truths that he might prefer not to know. In fact, the hero of The Crossing makes three crossings into the mysterious world of Mexico, each of successively greater difficulty and risk. What he finally discovers is that life is always full of grief and evil and that perhaps the most one can hope for is to survive the night in order to struggle once again and unsuccessfully to seize the day. McCarthy's West is the world, and the true secret of the world is that it does not get any better. McCarthy's vision is as apocalyptic in its way as that of such Native American writers as Leslie Silko, though McCarthy sees only a darkening wasteland, where Silko imagines the ultimate restoration of the land through an ecological catastrophe of modern technological civilization and a return of tribal cultures.

Since the Border Trilogy is not yet complete, it is hazardous to guess where it will all come out.6 However, there is a deep consistency throughout McCarthy's work, in spite of the dazzling changes between his “Southern” and his “Western” fiction. What haunts McCarthy as a storyteller is the way in which modern man is thrust into the world without much that he can depend on and is driven by a deep sense of frustration at being born too late for the past to be any kind of guide to action, security, and fulfillment. His desperate quest for truth and understanding is inevitably frustrated, and all the wisdom he learns cannot guarantee him anything beyond the moment in which he is alive. His heroes learn that all quests are futile, but that they have no choice but to continue their search through a world that is becoming progressively more complicated, more cruel, and more chaotic.

Cormac McCarthy links the new Western literature with that of the South through his increasing sense of the failure of white American civilization and its inescapable burden of guilt. The guilt comes from its destruction of nature and its tragic heritage of human waste represented by the extermination of great traditional cultures and by the pervasive racism of modern America. Other contemporary literary explorations of the history and culture of the South and the West, regions which were once so important as sources of romantic myths of otherness in American culture, have also produced compelling reevaluations of the basic myths of American exceptionalism and superiority and powerful critiques of the multiple failures of the American dream. It is striking, though perhaps not surprising, that these deeply critical literary movements have emerged almost simultaneously with a new surge of political conservatism and fundamentalism in America, also centered in the South and the West and seeking to manipulate the same symbolic and ideological traditions for their own very different purposes. As many commentators have noted, Ronald Reagan tried to reenact the Western myth of the shootout between the heroic marshall and the outlaw on the national and international scenes. The new breed of Southern Republicans who have recently become so important in American politics has found that a traditional Southern rhetoric of states rights, less government, family values, localism, and even a coded white supremacy skillfully disguised as opposition to affirmative action has proved highly effective on the national scene. These reactions are almost antithetical to those of serious contemporary Southern and Western writers, but they are probably different responses to the same uncertainties that have beset America in the last quarter of the twentieth century: a profound loss of confidence in America's uniqueness, moral superiority, and global omnipotence. In the context of this ongoing spiritual crisis, the South and the West, which once helped define America mythically and symbolically through their otherness, are now being pursued by both intellectual critics and conservative fundamentalists as symbols of the real truth of America.

Notes

  1. Passages like the following clearly reflect the influence of Joyce's method of amassing incredibly detailed catalogues of the people and things that haunt the Dublin streets:

    Every other face goitered, twisted, tubered with some excresence. Teeth black with rot, eyes rheumed and vacuous. Dour and diminutive people framed by paper cones of blossoms, hawkers of esoteric wares, curious electuaries ordered up in jars and elixirs decocted in the moon's dark. he went by stacks of crated pullets, plump hares with ruby eyes. Butter tubbed in ice and brown or alabaster eggs in ordered rows. Along by the meatcounters shuffling up flies out of the bloodstained sawdust. Where a calf's head rested pink and scalded on a tray and butchers honed their knives.

    [Suttree 67]

    In spite of the Joycean model, McCarthy imparts his own distinctive aura to the scene.

  2. Perhaps there's some hint of James Agee's nostalgically beautiful “Knoxville: Summer, 1915,” that haunting evocation of a bygone way of life from A Death in the Family, in McCarthy's Knoxville of the 1950s.

  3. Cf. John Shelton Reed, The Enduring South: Subcultural Persistence in Mass Society (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1972). Also Clyde N. Wilson, ed., Why the South Will Survive by Fifteen Southerners (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1981).

  4. The protagonist of Blood Meridian leaves Tennessee at the age of fourteen, about the same age Huck was when he decided to go down the river and then to run off to the “territory.” The Southwest where the kid goes might well be an extension of the “territory” and the historical period is the same, the 1840s. The kid is a Huck-like innocent who encounters a world of terrible violence and corruption and grotesque characters Twain would surely have appreciated. But this is the West as well, and the theme identified by Michael Herr as “regeneration through violence” is precisely the mythos that Richard Slotkin characterizes as the dominant theme of the myth of the frontier. I'm not sure, however, that there's much regeneration in Blood Meridian. Rather, the book lives up to its subtitle, The Evening Redness in the West. (Michael Herr's comment is quoted on the cover of the paperback edition of Blood Meridian. Slotkin's important three-volume analysis of the myth of the frontier began with Regeneration through Violence [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan UP, 1973].)

  5. It's pretty clear that Blood Meridian is also, like such sunnier post-Westerns as Thomas Berger's Little Big Man, a tacit commentary on the American invasion of Vietnam.

  6. Rumor has it that the third volume tentatively titled Cities of the Plain will appear in the near future.

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