No Place for Home

Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy

Jay Ellis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135513436
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book was written to venture beyond interpretations of Cormac McCarthy's characters as simple, antinomian, and non-psychological; and of his landscapes as unrelated to the violent arcs of often orphaned and always emotionally isolated and socially detached characters. As McCarthy usually eschews direct indications of psychology, his landscapes allow us to infer much about their motivations. The relationship of ambivalent nostalgia for domesticity to McCarthy's descriptions of space remains relatively unexamined at book length, and through less theoretical application than close reading. By including McCarthy's latest book, this study offer the only complete study of all nine novels. Within McCarthy studies, this book extends and complicates a growing interest in space and domesticity in his work. The author combines a high regard for McCarthy's stylistic prowess with a provocative reading of how his own psychological habits around gender issues and family relations power books that only appear to be stories of masculine heroics, expressions of misogynistic fear, or antinomian rejections of civilized life.

Chapter One

Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in McCarthy

[O]ur “Lexicon” would look upon literature as the thing added —the little white houses in a valley that was once a wilderness.

(Kenneth Burke)¹

GROUNDING

Blood Meridian led me to my first work on the writing of Cormac McCarthy, in simple admiration for the aesthetic achievement reached by his language. There, the counterpoint between speech and action, between the judge's high oratory and bloody war written over a landscape of “neuter austerity” (BM 247), suggested some correspondence between Holden's philosophy and McCarthy's descriptive technique. Then I noticed that, beyond the judge's oratory, this author's powers of description, the unusual word that turns out to be the perfect choice, his control of language at the level of sentences and paragraphs—these attributes of McCarthy's remarkable style appeared more often than not, and most powerfully, in his descriptions of setting. In McCarthy settings, language spreads a surface of dry lakebed description, or by contrast, rolls in waves of words laden with narrative import. This led me to begin a book reading the settings, particularly houses, graves, and fences, in the novels.

How could one narrator so regularly veer back and forth in descriptive habits, first refusing any human terms of perception and comprehension, but then claiming mythic consequence and alluding to layers of significance? In reading the other novels, it became obvious that McCarthy relies more on setting than on plot, or even character. Beyond the length and frequency of passages describing woods, hillsides, deserts, and broken-down houses, the style lavished on these descriptions highlights their importance. Even the title of McCarthy's latest book, No Country for Old Men, points to setting.

McCarthy presents his settings through language not usually allowed the characters, in neither their speech nor their thoughts and feelings. He instead lavishes words on space and place, reaching in those descriptions what Denis Donoghue calls his “high passages.” These high passages must “speak up for values the characters could not express; for regions, places, landscapes, vistas, movements of the seasons, trees, rain, snow, dawn, sunset, outer and inner weather; and for times not our time” (“Dream Work” 8). One of Donoghue's metaphors, however, has much to do with characters: “inner weather” is a subjective condition. McCarthy characters do experience inner weather, even if we seldom receive any direct sense of that weather. Rather, it is in the “high passages” of McCarthy's style, especially in descriptions of outer weather—of setting—that we may extrapolate from the style some sense of a character's interiority.

McCarthy's descriptive modes therefore enable the inference of psychology in a style that refuses (usually) to indulge in standard psychological techniques, such as first person, interior monologue, free indirect discourse, or even direct indications of psychology by a narrator. (The sudden frequency of “He thought about that” (NCFOM 172) and similar indications of character thought in No Country for Old Men generally stop short of indicating what, exactly, the character is thinking; Bell's extended confession complicates this assessment and must be dealt with later.) If not psychology itself, the limits of human epistemology, can then be inferred even from settings that indicate a mere surface landscape oblivious to human existence, occurring at the farthest possible remove from the interiority of characters.

Those descriptions of a world oblivious to human movement, let alone feeling, simply indicate the human condition from a distant view—a Hitchcockian God's eye (that in Hitchcock's strongest terms, is simply the uncaring eye of a hovering bird, and thus an eye of nature unassuaged by anthropocentrism). The famous “neuter austerity” of Blood Meridian does not necessarily negate the kid's moral dilemma, but it does remind us that such a dilemma can only be felt at an intermediate level of existence, above that level of geological time and “optical democracy” (BM 247) in the desert, but below the higher orders of reasoning at which the judge refuses human morality. Then such a setting reinforces the fact that the kid's moral dilemma cannot be reconciled with a judge of the false coins of human meaning, who claims access to higher knowledge. The judge's knowledge reaches so far beyond good and evil that it demands that the reader either condemn him as a moral outlaw—a devil—or find some other solution, such as an Eastern conception of a universe in which good and evil prove illusory. That landscape of “neuter austerity” makes it difficult (impossible for some readers) to keep hold of the kid's dilemma as anything real and powerful in the book.

Conversely, those passages of descriptive setting that ring with human meanings amount to more than perceptive feints on the part of a wholly disinterested narration, and instead simply obtain their validity only at the level of human experience below that allowed the narration and some vatic secondary characters.² These settings can nonetheless grant our limits of perception some meaningful connection with nature. (This can be true even as some such descriptions serve to distance us from such a connection, or lead us to question the validity of that connection experienced by a character.) They simply reserve for that connection a relatively local space—if we can remember that human mythology remains, in geological, let alone universal time, an enormously recent phenomenon. The Orchard Keeper provides an early example of this.

A chestnut tree hit by lightening is described as having “erupted to the heart” before it fells Arthur Ownby with part of its split trunk. “A slab fell away with a long hiss like a burning mast tilting seaward. He is down. A clash of shields rings and Valkyrie descend with cat's cries to bear him away” (TOK 172). The cat's cries are those of a real cat, yet we are allowed to listen in on how they are heard in mythic terms. Are those terms Ownby's or the narrators? The passage remains unclear on this. But McCarthy does not include here any description of setting to undermine the validity of the allusion—even if it reads as a bit of a stretch.

Ownby lives, lying unconscious for days in the rain-soaked woods, while the narrative moves off with other characters, so it is unclear how much time passes before Ownby comes to. But a flooding rain described in the meantime lasts seven days. Still, the narrative refuses to describe Ownby's surroundings as indifferent to his fall. Instead, the italicized return to him suggests that some magical connection, between the woods and this old man described in the terms of Norse myth, remains:

The wind had died and the night woods in their faintly breathing quietude held no sound but the kind rainfall [ . . . ] With grass in his mouth the old man sat up and peered about him, heard the rain mendicant-voiced, soft chanting in that dark gramarye that summons the earth to bridehood. (TOK 184, my emphasis)

The personification of nature here remains rare in McCarthy. But it does not disappear in the later books. And in this scene, not only is the rainfall “kind” and “soft chanting” in the voice of a beggar—a metaphor reversing the usual differential between setting and character in McCarthy—but it speaks also in “that dark gramarye” that The American Heritage Dictionary tells us is the language of “[o]ccult learning; magic.” This space, then, is the space of Frazer's Golden Bough, where humans make sense of their surroundings through magical belief in correspondences between themselves and the dark world surrounding them. In The Orchard Keeper, at least, McCarthy says nothing to suggest that such beliefs are false within the biological space of humans and flora, though we may assume that Ownby possesses some vatic knowledge uncommon among most of McCarthy's major characters.

Such correspondences remain limited in McCarthy, and they rarely appear through the pathetic fallacy. As I reread the novels, the natural world depicted in them most often seemed oblivious to the activities of human beings. Nevertheless, McCarthy's settings indirectly suggested the interiority of characters, by presenting us with a regular conflict between character and setting. After narrowing my focus to the setting in the other novels, I began to discern underlying rules governing McCarthy's descriptions of space.

Describe few houses of reliable construction; where the house would stand, reveal nothing of a full family inside. Describe regular problems around graves and burial. Have the characters cut, mend, place, and burn for fuel the very fences that would constrain their movements. The ease of identifying three particularly common types of spatial constraint—houses, graves, and fences—lent the early versions of this study a much-needed focus.

In reaction to those failed constraints, characters must take flight, or they must circle around within a larger constraint of space that usually cannot contain them. All protagonists (through eight of nine novels, at least) are young men. Fathers are gone, incinerated, hanged, corrupt, or emasculated—unless we count the judge. No Country for Old Men might seem to ignore these last two rules as it begins with a lone male protagonist who proves to be thirty-six, and who then gives way to the true protagonist, an older man. But Sheriff Bell (surprisingly, only fifty-seven) has lost his child and thus his role of a father (which he loses again in retirement). The novel's final vision of his long-dead father only reinforces his role as a son, if not indeed an orphan.

Protagonists, therefore, must be orphans, in one way or several ways. Finally, let characters die in the open, or oddly contained in death, discarded in pits, bags, trees, outhouses, and boxes. Noting the regularity of these turns in the novel's plots, of these character conditions, and of descriptions of setting, the novels all seemed to be about constraints of space—ineffectual or otherwise—about the flight of characters, when they could fly—and about some problem with families behind them.

This last interpretation, however, came with difficulty, though it extended from complications in interpreting the many broken houses in the books. Because of McCarthy's general rule against direct psychology (at that time broken regularly only in Suttree), it was still the case that one had to make reasonable inferences of character motivation by close reading descriptions of space—unless one wanted to interpret character dreams. But because the salient feature in McCarthy's style still seemed to me to be his descriptions of space and place, along with the absence of regular psychologizing, dreams seemed better to read for only one part of a character's motivations. Dreams in McCarthy point more to delusions, beliefs, and provisional truths, more than to larger truths; they indicate a key part of character motivation, but not all of that motivation, much of which McCarthy places beyond even the unconscious knowledge of his characters.³

Dreams usually place protagonists out in the open, for instance, and in this mode, they certainly indicate the need for flight in the characters. Yet, John Grady's dreams of horses do not tell us everything about his first quest to Mexico; for an understanding deeper than John Grady's dreams, we need only observe him (as we will in Chapter Six) in his grandfather's study. I began to think that son and father trouble lay behind much of the flight of McCarthy's protagonists. In returning to Blood Meridian, and then attempting to make some sense out of the aesthetic problems posed by No Country for Old Men, I felt compelled to examine possibilities of spatial constraint and character flight at a further remove than the psychological tensions of literal fathers and sons. The resulting book remains an attempt to account for space and place in McCarthy, and an attempt to account for the similarity of character flight in his novels, even as the types of spatial constraint I examine grew beyond those of houses, graves, and fences.

This book therefore enacts a critical progression, from something relatively simple to something more complex. Beginning with the more manageable project of close reading a relatively small set of McCarthy's descriptive habits, I move to unavoidable inferences concerning the character motivation behind flight in these novels. Eventually, Blood Meridian then demands a wider view: attention to space at several levels allows us to see how these novels address a variety of problems, from psychology, through history, and beyond history to problems of philosophy that stand outside human history (as McCarthy's work at the Santa Fe Institute, his few interviews, but more importantly his judge, all claim).

This movement is not, of course, linear and non-recursive. Looking back on the earlier close reading that began the project, I see more clearly how inferences of son and father trouble, for instance, unavoidably arise in reading The Orchard Keeper, and indeed, all the novels. And of course, the invaluable wealth of criticism quickly growing alongside McCarthy's continuing work has necessarily added to, and complicated, my views here.

If the results risk the fault of not laying out in immediately clear terms a nested set of theses regarding space in McCarthy, that is at least intentional: his novels continue to hold interest for me in their polyphonic and polysemantic quality. With a novelist whose obsessions run parallel with one another but at varying degrees of conscious intention, perhaps it is most suitable to follow an approach that itself develops alongside the progression of the novels themselves. My hope, then, is that the interpretive work here builds throughout the chapters.

It also made sense to me to add my interpretations only where they might be most useful. Excellent work on McCarthy's settings has already made my job easier here, as understandings of those settings under other theoretical lights has already been done elsewhere. If this book can contribute anything to that work, and to criticism focusing on the characters in the novels, it is perhaps in making the link between setting and character motivation. For this reason, for instance, I keep my remarks on McCarthy's famous “optical democracy” (BM 247), and on the more regularly eco critical treatments of his settings, brief.⁴

Eventually, I will make some inferences toward biographical criticism. This too has been done with McCarthy's work, but with research on his life (and sometimes with access) that is beyond my expertise or reach. Dianne Luce, Edwin Arnold, and Wesley Morgan continue to trace connections between McCarthy's works and their likely correspondences—in both the books of other authors and the life of McCarthy.⁵ Arnold has also shown an intriguing shift in McCarthy's image that corresponds to changes in his writing and in his reception. In a provocative study of the jacket photographs for the books, especially the series of photographs provided the press with the release of All the Pretty Horses, Arnold argues persuasively that McCarthy has tailored his image as much as his fiction (“Creating McCarthy”).

I can only add to this burgeoning biographical criticism through my readings of the texts, only daring to suggest correspondences between the life and the art where textual evidence simply overwhelms an avoidance of what can otherwise become a critical fallacy. McCarthy's reputation for reclusivity apparently proves to be a mask; more accurately, he simply avoids the particular culture around literature, including interviews (beyond two exceptions in over forty years of publishing), panels and awards ceremonies, and even casual conversation about his work. Particularly as I lack any inside information on the life of this writer, whatever hints of anxiety I find in the novels and then might imagine originate in the author's life are of limited use to a fair understanding of the work. Instead, I hope to add to the trend in biographical criticism only an understanding of how descriptions of character flight from domesticity (in particular) and ineffectual spatial constraints of a domestic nature haunt these books, and how some of these anxieties might be creative extensions of something in life.

Even if relatively scant biographical information might tempt us to connect the son and father trouble I read in these novels to a similar level of tension in McCarthy's life, for instance, that seems to me a reductive enterprise for serious criticism. To wonder, for instance, if McCarthy Senior's employment with the TVA, or the author's naming of his first son, might rather express themselves in the novels in ways that exhibit much anxiety about fatherhood, simply assumes that life informs the work. It does not follow that the level of son and father anxiety present in that work accurately represents the author's life. True artists know how to make something more interesting and complex out of things that, in life, are all too often simple to the point of boredom.

The point here is rather to answer questions that arise within the work. I will therefore explore, and then attempt to connect, all the various iterations of constraint and flight that create a fundamental tension through these novels. Furthermore, the power of language in McCarthy persists, thankfully, such that the complexity of his ideas cannot be simplified to fit a single interpretive approach. Here this means that there are simply too many interesting types of spatial constraint to warrant limiting our view to the merely psychological, let alone the merely biographical. Ultimately, a progression of studies of space at various l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in McCarthy
• Chapter Two “Fled, banished in death or exile:” Constraint and Flight in The Orchard Keeper
• Chapter Three Unhousing a Child of God
• Chapter Four Sins of the Father, Sins of the Son in Outer Dark, Suttree, and Blood Meridian
• Chapter Five “What happens to country” in Blood Meridian
• Chapter Six From Country to Houses in The Border Trilogy
• Chapter Seven Fetish and Collapse in No Country for Old Men
• Chapter Eight No Place for Home
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index