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[proximoception]

2nd half was amazing. This book is weird as hell though, in part because it's one of those half-absolute, half-apprenticeship works. Presumably he hit his stride while writing it but couldn't wrestle down what he'd already come up with. Parts could be tossed into The Orchard Keeper without penalty ("apprentice" McCarthy = still astonishingly good), others, tiny changes being made, would fit in Blood Meridian. Many others you'd find in Suttree and nowhere else in the world, granted.

The initial evasion of sex is fascinating, as are the bizarre, belated succumbings to it: on the model of Byron's Haidee cantos in the Wanda episode, and in some ways weirdly parallel to Beckett's "First Love" in the Joyce one, presumably because of similar life experiences rather than familiarity with it (Joyce = surely a tribute; was Bodine? The Crying of Lot 49, esp. the night walk & falling away of everyone, is a presence here.)

Parallels with Engine Summer are fascinating also, given the shared publication year and likely overlap in years of composition. The daterape by the witch surely involves details of an actual acid experience, as I'm absolutely convinced a crucial episode in Crowley's did.

Bloom sees Absalom, Absalom! as the unsuccessfully staved-off precursor work. I have no idea what he's talking about, for once. He must mean the diction, but that's as much out of Shakespeare, KJB, Melville and Joyce and is one of the book's glories, though probably unspeakably silly out of context--or at all, to many. I do see The Sound and the Fury here, esp. the first half of it (probably As I Lay Dying too), sometimes as a channel for Ulysses. All of the Stephen episodes are relevant except the library one (Suttree avoids reading books as resolutely as McCarthy's said to avoid talking about them)--though Nighttown gets mixed in with delirium tremens for the typhus sequence, which mostly left me cold. Strange to think of this book as a grandchild of Peer Gynt, great-grandchild of Faust. I guess the Alastor tradition gets in only through the Pynchon? The emphasis on passivity is always acute in McCarthy, even when that quest tradition finally sweeps him up, via Moby-Dick in Blood Meridian and more directly in The Border Trilogy. Even The Drunken Boat seems closer than Childe Roland, here.

Touches of Hemingway's dialogue and cruelty, Steinbeck's comic mode, Flannery O'Connor's sweet bright smile.

I'd nominate Sentimental Education as the nearest equivalent to Suttree, though. It's also curiously plausible as a sequel to Pierre, should Pierre have survived.

Comments

Suttree and Anti-Suttree

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

Nice entry. Thanks for this. He is taciturn about books, isn't he. On that silly Oprah special, he admitted Faulkner was inspired and he liked the way Joyce used punctuation. Not much else. Suttree and Dubliners are the only books, which, when I read them, I can't help imitating in my own work when I'm writing about autobiographical things. And they share a task - what Hartman calls a project to recover and inscribe those exilic images, to restore spirit to a place...

Apparently, Hogshead James Henry was a real person. I think I saw that somebody posted an image of his real obituary online somewhere. But what a happy detail for McCarthy if he wanted to comment on precursors. Based on how he writes, you can only imagine he thinks Henry James is the anti-Suttree.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I wonder if exile is crucial, then, for doing that. In Orchard Keeper, Knoxville is a sort of cloud of lights in the night that the novel circles without truly entering. Perhaps he was still there or too close to having been. Melville writes about the sea after leaving it in a similar lovingly detailed way. Dublin, Knoxville and the world's oceans are always entirely visionary and completely concrete and real, down to impossible-seeming levels of detail. Who else even tries this? Woolf in her recollections of vacations by the sea? Maybe Hardy and Faulkner--I wonder where Faulkner was when he wrote his big ones? And maybe Crowley's NYC in LB and Solitudes?

It's completely bizarre to think of McCarthy's as having anything to do with contemporary Knoxville, which I drive through every few months.