In Rough Country (13 page)
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
CORMAC Mc
CARTHY
If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind, would he not have done so by now?
â
BLOOD MERIDIAN
P
ascal's enigmatic remark in the
Pensées
, “Life is a dream a little less inconstant,” would be a fitting epigraph for the novels of Cormac McCarthy that unfold with the exhausting intensity of fever dreams. From the dense Faulknerian landscapes of his early, East Tennessee fiction to the monumental Grand Guignol
Blood Meridian
; from the prose ballads of the
Border Trilogy
to the tightly plotted crime novel,
No Country for Old Men,
McCarthy's fiction has been characterized by compulsive and doomed quests, sadistic rites of masculinity, a frenzy of perpetual motionâon foot, on horseback, in cars and pickups. No one would mistake Cormac McCarthy's worlds as “real” except in the way that fever dreams are “real,” a heightened and distilled gloss upon the human condition.
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1933, Cormac McCarthy was brought to live in East Tennessee at the age of four and from there moved to El Paso, Texas, in 1974. By his own account, he attended the University of Tennessee in 1952 and was asked not to return because his grades were so poor.
Subsequently he drifted about the country, worked at odd jobs, enlisted in the U.S. Air Force for four years of which two were spent in Alaska; after his discharge, he returned to the University of Tennessee for four years but left without receiving a degree. McCarthy's first four novels, which won for him a small, admiring audience of literary-minded readers, are distinctly Southern-Gothic in tone, setting, characters, language; his fifth, the mockepic
Blood Meridian
, set mostly in Mexico and California in the years 1849 to 1878, marks the author's dramatic reinvention of himself as a writer of the West: a visionary of vast, inhuman distances for whom the intensely personal psychology of the traditional realistic novel holds little interest.
Rare among writers, especially contemporary American writers, Cormac McCarthy seems to have written no autobiographical or memoirist fiction or essays.
Suttree
(1979), set along the banks of the Tennessee River at Knoxville, has the sprawl, heft, and gritty intimacy of autobiographical fiction in the mode of Jack Kerouac, but is not. McCarthy's most intelligent and sensitive protagonist so far has been John Grady Cole of
All the Pretty Horses
and
Cities of the Plain
, a stoic loner at the age of sixteen who plays chess with surprising skill, is an instinctive horseman, and, in other circumstances, would have studied to be a veterinarian, but John Grady is not representative of McCarthy's characters and shares no biographical background with the author. More generally, McCarthy's subjects are likely to be individuals driven by raw impulse and need, fanaticism rather than idealism, for whom formal education would have ended in grade school and who, if they carry
a Bible with them like the nameless kid of
Blood Meridian
, “no word of it could he read.”
In
The Orchard Keeper
and
Outer Dark
the dreamlike opacity of Faulkner's prose is predominant. These are slow-moving novels in which back-country natives drift like somnambulists in tragic/farcical dramas beyond their comprehension, let alone control. The setting is the East Tennessee hill country in the vicinity of Maryville, near the author's childhood home. Very like their predecessors in Faulkner's fiction set in mythical rural Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, McCarthy's uneducated, inarticulate and impoverished characters struggle for survival with a modicum of dignity; though they may endure tragic fates, they lack the intellectual capacity for insight. In
The Orchard Keeper
, the elderly Ather Ownby, “keeper” of a long-decayed peach orchard, is an independent and sympathetic figure who winds up confined to a mental hospital after firing his shotgun at county police officers. His rebellious spirit has been quelled, he has little but banalities to offer to a neighbor who has come to visit him: “Most ever man loves peace, and none better than an old man.” In
Outer Dark
, the hapless young mother Rinthy searches the Appalachian countryside for her lost baby, taken from her by her brother, the baby's father, and given to an itinerant tinker: a mix of Faulkner's Dewey Dell, of
As I Lay Dying
, who vainly seeks an abortion, and Lena Grove, of
Light in August
, who vainly seeks the man who has impregnated her, Rinthy makes her way on foot through an increasingly spooky landscape, but never finds her baby.
Outer Dark
is a more willfully obscure and self-consciously literary novel than
The Orchard Keeper
, burdened
by an excess of heavily Faulknerian prose in which even acts of startling violence come muted and dreamlike, lacking an elemental credibility:
The man took hold of the child and lifted it up. It was watching the fire. Holme [Rinthy's brother] saw the blade wink in the light like a long cat's eye slant and malevolent and a dark smile erupted on the child's throat and went all broken down the front of it. The child made no sound. It hung there with its one eye glazing over like a wet stone and the black blood pumping down its naked belly.
Beyond even Faulknerian obliqueness, McCarthy has eliminated all quotation marks from his prose so that his characters' speech isn't distinct from the narrative voice, in this way adumbrating the curious texture of our dreams in which spoken language isn't heard so much as felt and dialogue is swallowed up in its surroundings. This manner of narration, which some readers find distracting and pretentious, like McCarthy's continuous use of (untranslated) Spanish in his later novels, seems appropriate in these circumstances, and in any case will persist through his career:
The man had stretched out before the fire and was propped up on one elbow. He said: I wonder where a feller might find him a pair of bullhide boots like them you got.
Holme's mouth was dust dry and the piece of meat seemed to have grown bigger. I don't know, he said.
Don't know?
He turned the shirt again. He was very white and naked sitting there. They was give to me, he said.
Of McCarthy's four Tennessee-set novels,
Child of God
is the most memorable, a
tour de force
of masterfully sustained prose set pieces chronicling the life and abrupt death of a mountain man named Lester Ballard with a proclivity for collecting and enshrining dead bodies, predominantly those of attractive young females, in a cave to be discovered by Sevier County, Tennessee, officials only after his death:
The bodies were covered with adipocere, a pale gray-cheesy mold common to corpses in damp places, and scallops of light fungus grew among them as they do on logs rotting in the forest. The chamber was filled with a sour smell, a faint reek of ammonia. The sheriff and the deputy made a noose from a rope and they slipped it around the upper body of the first corpse and drew it tightâ¦Gray soapy clots of matter fell from the cadaver's chin. She ascended dangling. She sloughed in the weem of the noose. A gray rheum dripped.
Presumably based upon an actual case, or cases, of necrophiliac devotion in Appalachia, the legend of Lester Ballard is presented with dramatic brevity and an oblique sort of sympathy in a chorus of local voices:
I don't know. They say he never was right after his daddy killed himself. They was just the one boy. The mother had run offâ¦Me and Cecil Edwards was the ones cut him
down. He come in the store and told it like you'd tell it was rainin out. We went up there and walked in the barn and I seen his feet hanging. We just cut him down, let him fall on the floor. Just like cuttin down meat. He stood there and watched, never said nothin. He was about nine or ten year old at the time.
The narrator's voice suggests an eerie channeling of the “child of God” (that is, one who is “touched in the head”), Lester Ballard, if Ballard possessed the vocabulary to express his deepest yearnings: “Were there darker provinces of night he would have found them.” Ballard's debased and choked voice in collusion with the author's skill at simile yields wonderful results on every page:
When Ballard came out onto the porch there was a thin man with a mouthful of marbles, articulating his goatbone underjaw laboriously, the original one having been shot away.
Ballard squatted on his heels in the yard opposite the visitor. They looked like constipated gargoyles.
Say you found that old gal up on the turnaround?
Ballard sniffed. What gal? he said.
Freed of the ponderous solemnity of Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness, McCarthy has found a way to dramatize Faulknerian themes in a voice brilliantly his own. Like a balloon the author's omniscient eye floats above the bleakly comic adventures of his mock-hero: “An assortment of cats taking the weak sun watched [Lester Ballard] go.” Among the set
pieces of
Child of God
are inspired riffs like outtakes from Erskine Caldwell's luridly exploitative
Tobacco Road
(1932) and
God's Little Acre
(1933), in which redneck Appalachians spawn swarms of dim-witted mammalian females as in a pornographic fever dream: the dump keeper's “gangling progeny” with “black hair hanging from their armpits” and “sluggard lids,” named from a medical dictionaryâ“Urethra, Cerebella, Hernia Sue”âwho move like cats and like cats in heat attract “swains” by the dozens. Ballard is attracted to the “long blonde flatshanked daughter that used to sit with her legs propped so that you could see her drawers. She laughed all the time.” Yet it isn't Ballard but the omniscient narrative voice that presents such scenes:
They fell pregnant one by one. [The dump keeper] beat them. The wife cried and cried. There were three births that summer. The house was filling up, both rooms, the trailerâ¦The twelve year old began to swell. The air grew close. Grew rank and fetid. He found a pile of rags in a corner. Small lumps of yellow shit wrapped up and laid by. One day in the woodsâ¦he came across two figures humping away. He watched from behind a tree until he recognized one of his girls. He tried to creep up on them but the boy was wary and leaped up and was away through the woods hauling up his breeches as he went. The old man began to beat the girl with the stick he carried. She grabbed it. He over-balanced. They sprawled together in the leaves. Hot fishy reek of her freshened loins. Her peach drawers hung from a bush. The air about him grew electric. Next thing he knew his overalls
were about his knees and he was mounting her. Daddy quit, she said. Daddy. Ohhh.
Fleeing lawmen, Ballard finds himself trapped in an underground cave:
In the morning when the light in the fissure dimly marked him out this drowsing captive looked so inculpate in the fastness of his hollow stone you might have said he was half right who thought himself so grievous a case against the gods.
Tragic farce, or farcical tragedy,
Child of God
is very likely McCarthy's most perfectly realized work of fiction for its dramatic compression and sustained stylistic bravura, avoiding the excesses of his later, more ambitious novels.
Â
Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West
, McCarthy's fifth novel and the first set in the southwest borderlands to which he would lay a passionate literary claim, is the author's most challenging work of fiction, a nightmare chronicle of American marauders in Mexico in the 1850s rendered in voices grandiloquent and colloquial, ecstatic and debased, biblical and bombastic. Like William Gaddis's
The Recognitions
and Thomas Pynchon's
Gravity's Rainbow, Blood Meridian
is a highly idiosyncratic novel much admired by other writers, predominantly male writers, but difficult of access to a general reading audience, if not repellent. Admirers of
Blood Meridian
invariably dislike and disparage McCarthy's “accessible” best
selling
Border Trilogy
, as if these novels were a betrayal of the solemn rites of macho sadism and impacted fury of
Blood Meridian
1
for which the ideal cover art would be a Hieronymus Bosch rendering of some scenes of Zane Grey.
Yet
Blood Meridian
and the
Border Trilogy
are counterpoised: the one a furious debunking of the legendary West, the other a subdued, humane, and subtle exploration of the tangled roots of such legends of the West as they abide in the human heart. Where
Blood Meridian
scorns any idealism except the jeremiadâ“War is god”âthe interlinked novels of the
Border Trilogy
testify to the quixotic idealism that celebrates friendship, brotherhood, loyalty, the integrity of the cowboy-worker as one whose life is bound up with animals in a harsh, exhausting, and dangerous environment: “I love this life,” says Billy Parham of
Cities of the Plain
. After the phantasmagoria of
Blood Meridian
, the domestic realism of much of the
Border Trilogy
comes as a natural corrective.
All these novels of McCarthy's memorialize the southwestern landscape and its skies and weather, obsessively. In all, men and boys on horseback are in continual, often repetitive movement. “They rode on” is a mantra persistent as a clatter of hoofbeats. Often, whether in nineteenth-century Mexico or twentieth-century Texas, men may camp “in the ruins of an older culture deep in the stone mountains” oblivious of the history of such indigenous native ruins as they are of what such ruins might suggest of their own mortality. In the most romantic of the novels,
All the Pretty Horses
, sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole rides on his grandfather's ranch beneath a sun “blood red and elliptic,” along an old Comanche trail: