Bibliographie
BEAVERS Jay Aaron, “‘Stairwell to nowhere’: The Darkness of God in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree”, South Atlantic Review, Vol. 80, No. 1-2 (2015), 94-114.
BERNHOFT Iain, “‘Some degenerate entrepreneur fleeing from a medicine show’: Judge Holden in the Age of P. T. Barnum”, The Cormac McCarthy Journal, Vol. 10, No. 1 (2012), 27-45.
BREWTON Bruce, “The Changing Landscape of Violence in Cormac McCarthy’s Early Novels and the Border Trilogy”, Southern Literary Journal, Fall 2004, Vol. 37, No. 1, 121-143.
BORTZ Maggie, “Carrying the Fire: Individuation Toward the Mature Masculine and Telos of Cultural Myth in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and The Road”, Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Fall 2011), 28-42.
DORSON James, “Demystifying the Judge: Law and Mythical Violence in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian”, Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 36, No. 2, Aesthetic Politics – Revolutionary and Counter-Revolutionary (Winter 2013), 105-121.
GILES James R., “Violence and the Immanence of the ‘Thing Unknown’: Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree”, Violence in the Contemporary American Novel: An End to Innocence, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000, 84-99, notes 140-141.
GRAMMER John M., “A Thing Against Which Time Will Not Prevail: Pastoral and History in McCarthy’s South”, in Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce (eds.), Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999.
GREVE Julius, “‘Another kind of clay’: On Blood Meridian’s Okenian Philosophy of Nature”, The Cormac McCarthy Journal, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2015), 27-53.
GUILLEMIN Georg, The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy, College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004.
HUEBERT David, “Eating and Mourning the Corpse of the World: Ecological Cannibalism and Elegiac Protomourning in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, The Cormac McCarthy Journal, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2017), 66-87.
JARRETT Robert L., Cormac McCarthy, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997.
KOLAROV Radosvet, Repetition and Creation: Poetics of Autotextuality, New York and London: Routledge, 2021.
MCCARTHY Cormac, The Orchard Keeper, New York: Vintage Books, (1965) 1993.
MCCARTHY Cormac, Outer Dark, New York: Vintage Books, (1968) 1993.
MCCARTHY Cormac, Child of God, New York: Vintage Books, (1973) 1993.
MCCARTHY Cormac, Suttree, New York: Vintage Books, (1979) 1992.
MCCARTHY Cormac, Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West, New York: Vintage Books, (1985) 1992.
MCCARTHY Cormac, No Country for Old Men, London: Picador, 2010.
MCCARTHY Cormac, The Road, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.
ROTHFORK John, “Cormac McCarthy as Pragmatist”, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Winter 2006, Vol. 47, No. 2, 201-214.
SNYDER Philip A., ““Disappearance in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian”, Western American Literature, Summer 2009, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Summer 2009), 126-139.
YARBROUGH Scott D., “Tricksters and Lightbringers in McCarthy’s Post-Appalachian Novels”, The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 2012, Vol. 10, No. 1, 46- 55.
YOUNG Jr. Thomas D., “The Imprisonment of Sensibility: Suttree”, Southern Quarterly 30.4 (1992), 72-92.
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Notes
Cormac McCarthy, Suttree, New York: Vintage Books, (1979) 1992, 5.
Scott D. Yarbrough, “Tricksters and Lightbringers in McCarthy’s Post-Appalachian Novels”, The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 2012, Vol. 10, No. 1, 46.
Suttree, 366.
The reader may think of the “tree of dead babies” in Blood Meridian, the murder perpetrated by Chigurh in the first pages of No Country for Old Men or, in The Road, the baby on a spit (“What the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit.” 167) and the cannibals’ underground ‘storage’ room.
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West, New York: Vintage Books, (1985) 1992, 282.
Autotextuality is defined as a form of “self-citation”, an internal referencing system within an author’s work. See <http://www.item.ens.fr/dictionnaire/autotextualite/>.Radosvet Kolarov defines autotextuality as the dialogue between texts written by the same author. “The interaction between texts has not only generative, building function. It also plays a hermeneutic part. “Hermeneutical” autotextuality explores the interpretational intentions of a text towards another one, the cases when one of the texts tries to elucidate “dark” places of another text, as well as to enhance some semantic points that are at first glance peripheral but have strategic meaning.” (Radosvet Kolarov, Repetition and Creation: Poetics of Autotextuality, New York and London: Routledge, 2021, 12-13) This definition corresponds precisely to the work undertaken in this paper.
Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men, London: Picador, 2010, 292.
Robert L. Jarrett, “Chapter Three: Postmodern Outcasts and Alienation: Child of God and Suttree”, Cormac McCarthy, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997, 56.
John M. Grammer, “A Thing Against Which Time Will Not Prevail: Pastoral and History in McCarthy’s South”, Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, ed. Edwin T. Arnold et Dianne C. Luce, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999, 41. Grammer uses as a title another occurrence of the signifiers under study here (“thing”), in a phrase which is also consistent with this analysis.
James R. Giles, “Violence and the Immanence of the ‘Thing Unknown’: Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree”, Violence in the Contemporary American Novel: An End to Innocence, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000, 87.
See the useful list created by John Sepich: <http://www.johnsepich.com/documents/words_cormac_mccarthy_uses_in_his_novels.pdf>. For instance, the word ‘nameless’ appears 42 times in his novels, ‘unknow’ 28 times.
Blood Meridian, 147.
“Bald and pale and bloated, larval to some unreckonable being.” (Blood Meridian, 57) Physical similarities with the judge are also particularly striking and foretelling here.
The Orchard Keeper, 24.
Outer Dark is the title of Cormac McCarthy’s second novel and was published in 1968.
James R. Giles, op. cit., 94.
McCarthy’s upcoming novel Stella Maris, to be published in November 2022, seems in keeping with this violent and threatening presence: “I knew what my brother did not, that there was an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world and there always had been. That at the core of reality lies a deep and eternal demonium.” (quoted in: Constance Grady, “Cormac McCarthy’s two new novels are deliberately frustrating”, Vox, 26 Oct 2022, <https://www.vox.com/culture/23423262/passenger-stella-maris-review-cormac-mccarthy>).
This can be felt in Suttree’s words: “Barrenness of heart and gothic loneliness. […] “Visions of unspeakable loveliness from a world lost. To make you ache with want.” (Suttree, 50, emphasis added.) Suttree seems, albeit unconsciously, to look for this extreme state of pain and solitude in order to reach the optimal conditions for confrontation with this ‘being’.
This interpretation also seems relevant when analyzing Moss’s decision to go back to the site of the drug deal gone wrong in No Country for Old Men.
Suttree, 86.
In No Country for Old Men, Chigurh is another embodiment of such “surgeons”. The autotextual reference is rather striking here.
Thomas D. Young Jr., “The Imprisonment of Sensibility: Suttree”, Southern Quarterly 30.4 (1992), 75.
Jay Aaron Beavers, “‘Stairwell to nowhere’: The Darkness of God in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree”, South Atlantic Review, Vol. 80, No. 1-2 (2015), 107.
Ibidem, 102. The passage Beavers refers to is the following: “Suttree’s cameo visage in the black glass watched him across his lamplit shoulder. He leaned and blew away the flame, his double, the image overhead” (Suttree, 414)
Suttree, 287.
Jay Aaron Beavers, op. cit.,103.
Suttree, 461.
Julius Greve, “‘Another kind of clay’: On Blood Meridian’s Okenian Philosophy of Nature”, The Cormac McCarthy Journal, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2015), 34.
In Child of God, the image of Lester Ballard coming out of the cave where he leaves his corpses, which is itself described as the “innards of some great beast” (p. 135), with blood and mud on his feet (“[h]is own tracks came from the cave bloodred with cavemud […]”) seems to directly suggest that he is the community’s creation.
“Am I a monster, are there monsters in me?” Suttree, 366.
The recent use of this narrative device in The Road is another striking example.
Philip A. Snyder, ““Disappearance in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian”, Western American Literature, Summer 2009, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Summer 2009), 136.
Blood Meridian, 81.
Scott D. Yarbrough, op. cit., 50.
James Dorson, “Demystifying the Judge: Law and Mythical Violence in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian”, Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 36, No. 2, Aesthetic Politics – Revolutionary and Counter-Revolutionary (Winter 2013), 107.
Ibidem, 109.
No Country for Old Men, 46.
“Somewhere in the gray wood by the river is the huntsman and in the brooming corn and in the castellated press of cities. His work lies all wheres and his hounds tire not.” (Suttree, 471)
James Dorson, op. cit., 108.
Ibidem, 113.
David Huerbert notes that this opposition between good and bad is a survival mechanism meant to keep the boy alive rather than actually reflecting the true nature of the two characters. He also notes that McCarthy’s revisionist stance actually transcends traditional dichotomies, including that between “good” and “bad”. (David Huebert, “Eating and Mourning the Corpse of the World: Ecological Cannibalism and Elegiac Protomourning in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, The Cormac McCarthy Journal, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2017), 76).
Maggie Bortz, “Carrying the Fire: Individuation Toward the Mature Masculine and Telos of Cultural Myth in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and The Road”, Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Fall 2011), 34.
Philip A. Snyder, op. cit., 128.
Another manifestation of this process is developed in The Road, where the tension between disappearing signifiers and the constantly evolving signified, mirrored in the disappearance of the world as the readers know it, reaches a narrative climax.
“I’ll be in the neighborhood. Okay?
Where’s the neighborhood?
It just means I wont be far.
Okay.” (The Road, 81)
Georg Guillemin, “Chapter Two: “Optical Democracy”, Biocentrism in Blood Meridian (1985)”, The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy, College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004, 93.
Blood Meridian, 65.
Ibidem, 19.
“Then he descended the esker and passed once more across the boneyard led by the tethered fool until the two were shimmering and insubstantial in the waves of heat and then they were gone altogether.” Ibid., 300.
Ibid., p. 281-282. Iain Bernhoft notes that “this meaning-dimmed form provokes in McCarthy criticism an array of interpretations – literary, theological and symbolic. [The judge] is Ahab and Whale, Iago and MacBeth, a Gnostic archon and Shiva the destroyer; the personification of Enlightenment rationalism, Nietzschean nihilism, or Manifest Destiny; the devil himself or culture itself”. Iain Bernhoft, “‘Some degenerate entrepreneur fleeing from a medicine show’: Judge Holden in the Age of P. T. Barnum”, The Cormac McCarthy Journal, Vol. 10, No. 1 (2012), 27. This excess and differences in interpretations point to a form of universality or “patchwork” being in what the character of the judge represents, this universality lying in the common traits between all the characters, writers and movements mentioned.
John Rothfork, “Cormac McCarthy as Pragmatist”, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Winter 2006, Vol. 47, No. 2, 202.
Suttree, 9. A couple of pages earlier, in the same scene, the same signifiers are also used, announcing the discovery of the dead body: “A wet curled sluggishly on the river’s surface as if something unseen had stirred in the deeps and small bubbles of gas erupted in oily spectra.” Ibid., 7.
“He looked like anybody.” “I mean there wasnt nothin unsusual looking about him”. (No Country for Old Men, 292). All the terms used to describe Chigurh are signifiers which are either negative or point to vagueness and imprecision. The sheriff himself describes Chigurh as a ‘ghost’, an unseizable creature between life and death.
Blood Meridian, 282.
Iain Bernhoft, op. cit., 35.
Blood Meridian, 300-301, emphasis added.
It is also in this attitude that a difference between Suttree and the other characters is established. Suttree no longer waits for the huntsman to come and get him. At the end of the novel, he is on the move, as expressed in the final words of the novel; “Fly them”. (Suttree, 471)
No Country for Old Men, 108.
John M. Grammer, op. cit., 33.
David Huebert, op. cit., 70.
Suttree, 381.
Bruce Brewton, “The Changing Landscape of Violence in Cormac McCarthy’s Early Novels and the Border Trilogy”, Southern Literary Journal, Fall 2004, Vol. 37, No. 1, 141.
“The kid spoke to him. He aint nothin. You told me so yourself. Men are made of the dust of the earth. You said it was no pair… pair…
Parable
No parable. That it was a naked fact and the judge was a man like all men.” (Blood Meridian, 297).
This extract shows that the kid heard the truth, repeats it, but is incapable of comprehending it. The reader can note the irony in the double negation ‘he aint nothin’ and the kid’s pronunciation issue leading to confusion becomes extremely relevant in this study of doubles (‘no pair, pair’).
Scott D. Yarbrough, op. cit., 52.
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