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V O L U M E I, N O . I LN A T H E A M E R I C A N L I T E R A R Y N A T U R A L I S M N EWSLETTER The Editor’s Un-Easy Chair: Welcome to the inaugural issue of ALN: In This Issue: The American Literary Naturalism Newsletter. Everyone here at ALN (yes, we have a staff of Features thousands) hopes that this issue finds you well and that you enjoy issue number one. Naturalism in the Classroom For many years I have wished for a place where scholars of American literary naturalism Teaching the Contemporary Naturalism of 2 could go for call-for-papers, bibliographic Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark updates, and news-related items. I usually had James R. Giles that wish each fall as I searched for call-for- papers for the annual ALA conference. Some Naturalism, Transcendentalism, and the 7 societies e-mailed their cfps to a discussion list, American Landscape: An Undergraduate Course in American Nature Writing others mailed them with dues notices, and still Steven Frye others seemed to keep their cfps a well guarded secret, fearing, I believe, government reprisal Interview or worse. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could create a centralized location for all things Ten Questions with Clare Eby 11 naturalism? I thought to myself in December 2005, a veritable Wal-Mart of naturalism? Thus ALN was born, but we eliminated the Departments doorway greeters with the happy-face buttons. Five on Fourteen 14 I knew that I couldn’t produce ALN with- Read these books. Now. out help, so I enlisted the aid of Steven Frye as Associate Editor with false promises of fame Naturalism News 14 and financial reward, and we called a meeting Things Brian Williams is afraid to tell you of the relevant power brokers at the 2006 ALA conference. After a productive hour, we broke The Call of the Papers 19 for lunch with a plan in place and cross-society Meet me at the Spouter Inn for Chowda cooperation established. Now, five months and much fretting later, ALN is a reality, with an The Bibliographic Update 21 initial distribution of about 500 copies. Ask yourself: have I earned tenure yet? My thanks to everyone who helped in the From the Archives 26 production of this issue. Special thanks to Old stuff you should probably care about Steven Frye for his able assistance, to Joseph Garfield and Cindy Lloyd for helping me with In Memoriam 30 numerous technical matters, and to Clare Eby, Frank Norris Remembered James R. Giles, and Donna Campbell for their fine contributions to this issue. A Fistful of Websites 31 Indoor Surfing for Heliophobes Naturally, Eric Carl Link A LN Teaching the Contemporary novel opens and seems as much an inevitable condition of their lives as a choice they have Naturalism of Cormac made. The relationship of Outer Dark’s McCarthy’s Outer Dark existential overtones to the text’s dominant James R. Giles naturalism would be a profitable topic for classroom discussion, especially in the context As dramatically as any single text, Cormac of the issue of choice. In fact, Outer Dark McCarthy’s Outer Dark (1968) illustrates the provides a unique springboard for a discussion complexities of contemporary American of the extent to which individual choice can literary naturalism. The defining naturalistic logically exist in a naturalistic text. qualities of McCarthy’s second novel are a Unlike Rinthy, Culla is overwhelmed by multilayered determinism, a focus on illiterate guilt, which he augments by deciding to kill the characters existing on the margins of a baby. Unable to carry through on his decision, repressive society, the incorporation of extreme he abandons the unnamed child in the woods, plot elements dominated by violence and taboo an act that results in the baby’s kidnapping by a subject matter, and the narrative voice of a depraved, pornography-peddling tinker and sets detached spectator. The determinism of Outer in motion the period of wandering exile that he Dark exemplifies the distance that con- experiences for the rest of the novel. Before temporary American naturalism has traveled taking this drastic action, Culla goes to the from its late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth- nearest settlement to obtain food for Rinthy century origins. As Steven Barza, among only to find the only store closed because it is other critics, has pointed out, the external Sunday. When he attempts to gain entrance to forces that mold the lives of characters in late- the store, a voice “from an upper window” calls twentieth-century naturalism are predominantly down, “we still christians here. You’ll have to “unnamed, unknown, [and] inscrutable” come back a weekday” (p. 26). As signaled by (p.142). In the opening of Outer Dark, Culla McCarthy’s use of the lower-case “c,” and Rinthy Holme, brother and sister, are Christianity in Outer Dark, rather than isolated in a brutal and decadent landscape, providing spiritual assistance to desperate seeming to exist in a primitive state cut off characters, functions as an agent of harsh from any recognizably civilized community. judgment as is most evident in a scene late in The sheer isolation of their existence is one of the novel involving a “parson or what looked the central deterministic elements of like one” (p. 221) who almost brings about McCarthy’s novel. Culla’s death. In part, McCarthy is intent upon As is true of much contemporary satirizing Protestant fundamentalism here, but naturalism, a strong degree of existential guilt more importantly he is emphasizing that a is present in Outer Dark. Culla and Rinthy forgiving, supportive god is absent from the have committed incest, an act that results in world inhabited by Culla and Rinthy. Rinthy’s giving birth. The incest further Sexuality in the world of Outer Dark is divorces them, and Culla especially, from the exemplified by the tinker’s crude pornography, hope of meaningful redemption. Yet the sheer “a sorry drawing of a grotesquely coital isolation of their lives, never explained by couple.” When Culla pushes the pamphlet back McCarthy, makes the incest seem almost at him, the tinker observes, “I just thought I’d inevitable. Culla and Rinthy are virtually let ye take a peek. Don’t hurt nothin’ do it?” reincarnations of Adam and Eve trapped from (p. 8). In fact, it does hurt something: it the first in a decidedly fallen world. reduces sexuality, and the body, to the level of Moreover, the incest has occurred before the a grotesque biology. Culla does not reject the 2 V O L U M E I, N O . I pornography on moral or aesthetic grounds, but [the bearded man]: I guess you’d like to because, like his sister’s constantly lactating know [my name] . , wouldn’t ye? body, it evokes the guilt he feels over his Yes, Holme said. incestuous relationship with Rinthy. He is, in The man’s teeth appeared and went away fact, haunted by, and terrified of, his own again as if he had smiled. Yes, he said. I expect they’s lots would like to know that. sexuality. As in Norris’s McTeague, sexuality . in Outer Dark is a debased construct resulting Some things is best not named, the man in guilt and suffering. A comparison of said. (174-175) Norris’s and McCarthy’s approaches to sexuality would perhaps lead to a consideration The crimes of the triune (mass murder, of other important aspects of the two texts. cannibalism, grave robbing) constitute horrific Students could be asked to consider the degree violations of the most universal of social to which each writer incorporates sexuality in taboos. his novel for the purpose of sheer Characters who, to some degree, transcend sensationalism or whether they envision it as a traditional realism are not unknown in classic manifestation of a fallen and degenerate world. naturalism, as in, for instance, Vanamee, the After the tinker discovers the infant mystic, and S. Behrman, the personification of abandoned by Culla in the woods and kidnaps capitalist greed in Norris’s The Octopus, as it, Culla and Rinthy, illiterate and lacking any well as the transformed Buck, who attains knowledge of the world outside their limited mythological stature in the conclusion of experience, embark on separate journeys to London’s The Call of the Wild. But even recover the child. What Culla finds instead is these characters, unlike McCarthy’s grim a landscape so saturated with violence as to be triune, are envisioned as acting within a almost surreal. This unrelenting, extreme dominant fictional realism. The plane of violence is so inescapable in Outer Dark that it unreality inhabited by Outer Dark’s three functions as the central external determinist wandering killers is foreshadowed by Culla’s force in the novel; its origins are certainly nightmare that opens the novel’s central plot. unnamed and inscrutable. Still it takes on In it, Culla listens to a “prophet” exhorting “a human shape in the form of the “grim triune” delegation of human ruin who attended him that haunts the landscape through which Culla with blind eyes upturned and puckered stumps travels, bringing brutal, horrific death to and leprous sores.” Abruptly Culla finds him everyone with whom he comes in contact. As himself to be a pariah even among this much as any aspect of Outer Dark, McCarthy’s “delegation of human ruin”: “they grew treatment of the murderous trio exemplifies the seething and more mutinous and he tried to distance his aesthetic has traveled from classic hide among them but they knew him even in American naturalism.

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