In the Wake of the Sun Navigating the Southern Works of Cormac McCarthy Christopher J. Walsh In the Wake of the Sun In the Wake of the Sun Navigating the Southern Works of Cormac McCarthy Christopher J. Walsh Newfound Press THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE LIBRARIES, KNOXVILLE In the Wake of the Sun: Navigating the Southern Works of Cormac McCarthy © 2009 by Christopher J. Walsh Digital version at www.newfoundpress.utk.edu/pubs/walsh Newfound Press is a digital imprint of the University of Tennessee Libraries. Its publications are available for non-commercial and educational uses, such as research, teaching and private study. The author has licensed the work under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/>. For all other uses, contact: Newfound Press University of Tennessee Libraries 1015 Volunteer Boulevard Knoxville, TN 37996-1000 www.newfoundpress.utk.edu ISBN-13: 978-0-9797292-7-0 ISBN-10: 0-9797292-7-0 Walsh, Christopher J., 1968- In the wake of the sun : navigating the southern works of Cormac McCarthy / by Christopher J. Walsh. Knoxville, Tenn. : Newfound Press, University of Tennessee Libraries, c2009. xxiii, 376 p. : digital, PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. [357]-376). 1. McCarthy, Cormac, 1933- -- Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PS3563.C337 Z943 2009 Book and cover design by Jayne Rogers Cover image by Andi Pantz I dedicate this book to my mother, Maureen Lillian Walsh, and to the memory of my father, Peter Anthony Walsh (1934-2000), as their hard work and innumerable sacrifices made all of this possible. Contents Foreword ..............................................................................................ix Acknowledgments ............................................................................xix Introduction ......................................................................................xxi Note on the Text ...............................................................................xxv Chapter 1: Contexts ............................................................................. 1 Chapter 2: The Short Stories ............................................................. 27 Chapter 3: The Orchard Keeper.........................................................45 Chapter 4: Outer Dark .......................................................................97 Chapter 5. Child of God ................................................................... 143 Chapter 6: Suttree ............................................................................ 179 Chapter 7: The Road ......................................................................... 253 Chapter 8: The Stonemason ............................................................. 295 Chapter 9: The Gardener’s Son ........................................................ 323 Conclusion ........................................................................................ 353 Bibliography ..................................................................................... 357 Foreword At the appearance of this addition to scholarship on Cormac Mc- Carthy, the published contribution to American Literature by that writer runs to ten novels, a screenplay, a stage play, and his recent “novel in dramatic form,” The Sunset Limited. Texas State University at San Marcos has archived a comprehensive collection of McCarthy’s papers, including drafts of all these works, three unpublished screen- plays, and at least early drafts of three novels as yet also unpublished. McCarthy’s first fiction, set in the American South, earned him the Ingram-Merrill Award for 1959 and 1960. Over the intervening fifty years, he has been awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Grant (1966- 68), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1969), a MacArthur Fellowship—the popularly-known “genius award” (1981), the National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses (1992), and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his latest novel, The Road (2007). That last book’s remarkable adapta- tion to film bears witness to many truths, both unsettling and reaf- firming. Despite the filmmakers’ intelligent use of several locales and the aid of computer-generated editing, one scene, uncannily echoing its source, reminds us of a basic truth in McCarthy’s writing: how- ever universal the range of his achievement, McCarthy began as, and in The Road became again, a Southern writer. Christopher Walsh’s organization of a conference centered on The Road made precisely this point. The Road Home: McCarthy’s Imaginative Return to the South included a detailed tracing of the route of that novel’s father and son by Walsh’s colleague, Wes Mor- gan; it seems that walking the route of the novel in the real world would take one directly through the settings of McCarthy’s first FOREWORD four novels. Before reaching the sea, one would have been able to pause and reach out and touch the home of the author, just across the river from most of Knoxville, Tennessee. Sadly, that home has since burned to the ground. The man in the novel, no less than his creator, needs to return to the site of his origins before moving on. Walsh’s paper for that conference, “The Post-Southern Sense of Place in The Road,” argued that McCarthy’s work reaches an imaginative vision of the American South that enables a larger mythology of America, and even connects to America’s troubled branching overseas. The roots of McCarthy’s American South, as our collective schol- arship on this author began to realize through emerging details from McCarthy’s life, seem to be more localized than we once thought. From the names of his characters to their relentless drive away from their homes, McCarthy’s stories reflect, as if through a prism, an imaginative overlay, a vision drawn on top of places one might still walk, in the postage stamp of hills and flooded valleys in which the young Charles McCarthy Jr. (before he changed his name to that of the Irish king Cormac) grew up. Astonished by Walsh’s ability to connect a deep theoretical and textual reading of the Southern nov- els to broader concerns of interest to McCarthy scholars, I was happy to hear that he was working on a book. Recognition of McCarthy’s work finally grows apace with his production of it, and it becomes all the more important to revisit the earlier works, as well as to frame his later novels in terms of the region from which he, and those still- astonishing first four books, arose. With the 2007 Knoxville conference, Walsh simultaneously ac- complished a feat that might go unnoticed by a few readers of this book, but one of which we might take note for posterity. In the wake of devastated budgets for academic travel, and facing the sad fact that many conferences were attended only by specialized scholars whose x FOREWORD papers were accepted for presentation, we had seen a troubling di- minishment in the liveliness once afforded by academic conferences (particularly after September 11, 2001). Too often, conferences con- sist of insular panels, three or four people taking turns reading to each other but with little real interaction among participants, pos- sibly no audience beyond presenters, and most distressing to some of us, likely no one from outside academia in attendance. Trends in scholarly publishing had meanwhile erected more formidable obstacles to scholarship finding the audience it deserves. The New- found Press arose to meet these challenges, first by electronically publishing the proceedings of the 2007 conference, which they also videotaped and made available by streaming video. Walsh’s confer- ence not only drew many scholars beyond those reading, but also welcomed a remarkable number of lay people interested in Mc- Carthy—Knoxville authors but also Knoxville area readers, and some from much farther away. His success organizing the Knoxville proceedings (one of the strongest collections of papers given at any of the roughly two dozen conferences at which I have heard offer- ings on McCarthy) was therefore extended virtually by Newfound Press to an even wider audience. Newfound’s forward-thinking ini- tiatives in electronic publishing, and in the asynchronous offering of proceedings to audiences unable to travel to particular conferences, have expanded the audience for scholarship on authors of interest to all serious readers. Walsh’s earlier accomplishments therefore find a suitable culmination in the publication of this book by Newfound Press. When I had a chance to read his argument in full, I was de- lighted by the experience. xi FOREWORD In the Wake of the Sun: Navigating the Southern Works of Cormac McCarthy achieves a critical step in understanding this difficult con- temporary writer’s place in the literature and culture of the American South, as well as his place in post-WWII American fiction. Walsh’s writing welcomes all those interested in this remarkable novelist and dramatist, from lay readers to high school teachers and students, un- dergraduates and their professors, and serious scholars of McCarthy from the graduate level up. As if following the model of his subject, Walsh may send some readers to the dictionary from time to time, but the trip proves worthwhile, and Walsh’s language remains ac- cessible to anyone already willing to take on the challenges posed by McCarthy’s often disturbing subjects and sometimes difficult style. Within McCarthy criticism, this book fills an obvious need: with the exception of the earliest