All Limbo's Clamor

Who, I wondered, towards the end of Outer Dark, actually read this book when it was published in 1968? Who closed it and thought, "Oh, I have to tell my friends about this one"? Who, in turn, was told about it and then rushed to the bookstore to buy their own copy? Now, forty years later, Cormac McCarthy is widely considered one of the greatest -- if not the greatest -- living American writers, and along with that reputation comes a sizable audience who wants to know what all the fuss is about. Those people will start with the most famous books, like No Country for Old Men or The Road, and if they're keen enough on those will begin working their way through the rest of them. But if anybody should happen, for whatever reason, to start with Outer Dark, will they wish to continue?

Well, of course some of them will. Had I started with Outer Dark, I feel pretty confident I would have continued to read McCarthy. After all, it's a work of bizarre, unique genius. But it's also one of the most gut-turning, unblinking and disturbing horror novels I've ever read.

More about that word "horror" later. First, I'll give you a brief idea of the story. Somewhere in the American South, probably around the end of the 19th century, a woman named Rinthy Holme is about to give birth. Her brother, Culla, is the father. Upon giving birth, Culla takes the baby (a boy, or "chap", as he's referred to throughout the novel) into the woods and leaves it there. He tells his sister that the baby died of natural causes. In fact, the baby didn't die at all, but rather was taken from its lonely patch of forest by a tinker (referred to only as "the tinker"). Rinthy discovers her brother's lie, and, believing that Culla traded the child to the tinker, sets out to find her "chap". Shortly after that, Culla sets out to find Rinthy.

The novel tells its story in alternating chapters: one chapter following Culla, the next following Rinthy. Every third chapter, or so, is broken up by short accounts of three mysterious, unnamed, deeply dangerous men. These men begin to leave behind them a trail of corpses (one of the killers, "the bearded man", uses a large knife to "unhinge" a man), though the reasons behind these murders are mysterious, as is the connection between the killers and Rinthy and Culla.

As always, McCarthy's prose is striking: a bizarre mix of Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce and the Bible, but still completely McCarthy's own words. As one might imagine, this mixture produces disorienting results. A clean, precise sentence such as...

It was later afternoon when they set forth again, out from the town, the wheels rasping in the sand, back down the yellow road.

...is followed up immediately by sentences like this:

Night fell upon them dark and starblown and the wagon grew swollen near mute with dew. On their chairs in such black immobility these travelers could have been stone figures quarried from the architecture of an older time.

That "starblown" is particularly Joycean. There are a lot of brand new compounds like that (see also "redgummed" and "spraddlelegged", along with many more). As with Joyce, this has the effect of very concisely and poetically describing an image by using words that, in effect, hadn't existed before. But also like Joyce, he can produce nearly impenetrable (or actually impenetrable, in the case of Joyce) passages that make you want to put the book down and not speak to it for a few hours:

It howled execration up the dim camarine world of its nativity wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless paraclete beleagured with all limbo's clamor.

That was from the second of two paragraphs, back to back, early in the novel that made me begin to fear I'd pulled the wrong book from my shelf, when I read this about four months ago. I do find this kind of writing infuriating, and I don't really understand why the critical community doesn't also look at it a little askance. But it's so taken for granted with McCarthy that even the back cover copy of my edition can't help but get into the act, with its proud and giddy use of the word "fabular".

However, that kind of writing is very rare, and more often we get this kind:

Holme left the road and clambered up the rocky slope to give them leeway. The first of the drovers was beating his way obliquely across the herd toward him, the hogs flaring and squealing and closing behind him again like syrup. When he gained the open ground he came along easily, smiling up to where Holme sat on a rock with his feet dangling and looking down with no little wonder at this spectacle.

This scene, which describes Culla Holme watching a sea of hogs being herded through a field, will turn sour for Culla. Many of his experiences during the course of this novel do. Each of his chapters described him searching, often vainly, for work to support himself during his search for Rinthy. He's occasionally accused of crimes he didn't commit (while only the tinker, who we do meet again, is aware of the crime he actually did commit). Rinthy's chapters, on the other hand, describe her finding kindness and charity almost wherever she goes, though her search for the tinker and her son seems hopeless. Meanwhile, those three men have started killing people, and we gradually realize that we've met their victims earlier in the book, when Culla encountered them in his travels.

So where is all of this heading? It's heading, as is usually the case with McCarthy, to a kind of Apocalypse. (Spoiler) For McCarthy, in book after book, the sick, mad, shrieking end of humanity is represented by the violent death of infants. Babies are murdered by the handful in Blood Meridian; a baby is roasted on a spit in The Road (and though I don't wish to drag politics into this, I'd be remiss if I brought up this motif and didn't mention that, in No Country for Old Men, Sheriff Bell speaks very unfavorably about abortion). These infants are always faceless and nameless, but by being slaughtered so casually and motivelessly in Blood Meridian, or used for sustenance by depraved adults in The Road, their humanity is somehow heightened. This, McCarthy is saying, is as bad as it can get. Once this happens, nothing is salvageable. In Outer Dark we get this act presented, by its perpetrator, as a kind of infernal lesson, or as a rebuke. It's a way of saying to the one who witnesses it: See what you did?(End spoiler)

I've thought a lot today about the violence in McCarthy's fiction, and I think that, for myself, one of the reasons it's so jarring is because it's so uncommon in literary fiction. Other writers of McCarthy's stature and ambition have dealt with savage violence from time to time, but with those writers it tends to be a sort of experiment, or an itch that needed scratching before returning to their other work. But in McCarthy, grotesque, brutal violence is always there, and it's depicted at a level so graphic that the only equivelant in fiction I've seen is in the horror genre. But what I realized today is that, in horror fiction (of which I read a lot), if the book is especially violent it tends to also be especially bad. The truly great horror writers are generally more subdued about violence, often only suggesting the worst; if they deal with it straight on, they only very rarely dwell on it. But McCarthy takes the violence of "splatter" horror and weds it with the stark poetry of great American fiction. It's a jarring combination, almost appalling. And in Outer Dark, it's also otherworldly. The three killers float through the novel like ghosts, and they shouldn't know, or care, about the events of this story; they shouldn't know about Culla or Rinthy or their baby. But by the end, the bearded man seems to know more than he's saying. In fact, he knows more than we do.