ReRead McCarthy's Tennessee Novels

[bleodswean]

 

I know there aren’t any diehard Cormac McCarthy fans on the flist and that’s too bad. I will hold forth about him regardless. LOL. I do recognize that he’s a bit of a peculiar flavour for an unusual literary connoisseur. I was standing dumbly in the library wanting to read something and feeling that strange deep brain itch. What is it what is it? And my eye fell on the Cormac shelf and I thought HUH I never finished my plan last year to read the four Tennessee tomes. And when I reached up for the thin volume title Child of God, it was as though struck by lightning, and I remembered that I had loaned that to my father the year before he died. And that was all a complicated bit of emotion, but I drew it down anyway and decided to take that dark, unsettling plunge into fetid waters.  This book is difficult. And I had to LOL when all the pearl clutchers were outraged that Cormac had some sort of underaged bird in a cage at some point in his life as though they were exposing a saint as a chronic masturbator and yet I’m pointing wildly to this book – PEOPLE PEOPLE PEOPLE! This is the cat who wrote Child of God, puhleaze get yourselves comported. This book. Sheesh. And I thought my father should read this. WUT?! Actually he was a Cormac fan but like most Cormac fans, the SouthernGoth foursome are rarely known. We did discuss it at the time and then I loaned him Annihilation. Which he actually enjoyed muchly. 

 

Anyway. I read CoG and spent most of yesterday in a dreamlike space in which my mind wandered the universe seeking out this man’s spirit. I love him so very very very desperately. He was a genius and a wordsmith, yes, but more, his was a Dangerous Intelligence and a life laid out with strange signposts and somehow someway he managed to take his brilliance and observational gifts from start to finish. The Tennessee four are IMPORTANT in his oeuvre and some in the Ivory Towers need to put Blood Meridian the eff down and study these four novels. They are biographical in that this man clearly had an issue with his Family of Origin because no one would write Child of God unless they truly wanted to self-flagellate and publicly humiliate themselves as a way to punish their father.  

 

So, I read The Orchard Keeper which is dismissed by academicians. I love it and it shows McCarthy reveling in his discovery of language. HIS LANGUAGE. Then I read Suttree which is his biographical masterpiece and most clearly obvious outloud musings about a symbolic meaning of Death. Then I had to gently gently return to my favourite novel of all time – Outer Dark and relish it entirely without wearing it too thin to hold onto. And yesterday I read Child of God. I find myself purged and resatiated and now am ready for the Westerns. Which I don’t care for as deeply as I care for the SouthernGoths, however, one must ruck through in order to reach the Dantean conclusion which is his twinpack – Stella Maris and Passenger. 

 

That’s where my head and heart and body have been and currently are. I have time to wallow in this pit. But by tomorrow I have to return to what we call The Real World. 

 

Comments

[halfshellvenus]

! Child of God is the one McCarthy book I tried to read, and I bailed on it both because of the difficulty of slogging through the prose (all written in dialect) and the subject matter. :O