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Jan. 14th, 2009 03:48 am2nd 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.
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.
