Cuerpos colegiados

Introduction

Child of God (1973)⁹⁷ continues the trajectory which led through the wanderings of Outer Dark to explore further regions of horror and human degradation. Remaining within rural Tennessee, McCarthy’s third novel tells the tale of another perverse Adamic character in the figure of Lester Ballard, a misfit and social outcast who engages in acts of murder and necrophilia that are narrated with a care for repugnant and gruesome details that is rare even among the most dire confections of the Southern Gothic. Yet, though these grisly accounts of Ballard’s depravities certainly make uneasy reading, the most formidable challenge for the reader is the sympathetic response the text elicits for this otherwise reprehensible character. Following on from his depiction of the deplorable but dubiously graced life of Culla Holme, McCarthy here continues with an even riskier venture of characterisation, presenting Ballard as both a sympathetic monster and an unsettling everyman figure. McCarthy introduces Lester in a direct address to the reader as a ‘child of God much like yourself perhaps’ (6), and thus the author invites our

identification with Ballard even as he begins to describe the ways in which this character distorts the forms and moral boundaries that constitute the

97 Cormac McCarthy, Child of God (London: Picador, 2010). All references are to this edition.

Page numbers will appear in the text in parentheses.

shared humanity that is presumed. Understanding what is signified in this epithet and the genuine, albeit precarious notion of humanity that it signals constitutes a significant part of the reader’s task of tracing his wandering course through a natural and spiritual wilderness. Yet, with the framing of the novel as something of detective story, it is clear that McCarthy intends this work as something more than just a profiling of a criminal mind, but also of the examination of material evidence. Indeed, McCarthy here marks a development from tracing the obfuscous, dreamy darkness of Outer Dark to the careful study of solid, physical and organic entities to examine how and in what manner the higher realm coincides with or resides within the material.

At root, Ballard is much like any of McCarthy’s protagonists. He is an

orphaned or outcast figure whose social and physical displacement compels a journey into the wilderness of sublime nature where, we presume, there is at least the possibility of his gaining a deeper understanding of himself and the world in which he moves. Ballard’s exclusion is established in the opening episode in which he attempts to disrupt the auction of his family home, which has been reclaimed by the state, presumably as a settlement for non-payment of taxes. Thereafter we are informed that Ballard while still a boy had

discovered his father hanging in the barn and that his mother had ‘run off’ (22-23). Ballard’s inability to live within his community leads him to take up a squalid existence in a dilapidated house in the woods, returning to the town only occasionally to cause irritation or outrage with his bizarre behaviour and obnoxious manner. Displaced from the domestic and the social, Ballard’s energies are turned toward securing his survival as he carves out his existence

in the wilderness. The main instrument of his survival is the rifle which he has carried with him since he was a boy and with which he demonstrates an unnerving proficiency. His only friend in the world is the keeper of a local dump situated in an abandoned quarry, whose home Ballard visits frequently, often only lingering long enough to harass his young daughters.

Ballard’s crossing of the geographical boundaries is coupled with a movement beyond the moral limits of the human community, as the needs and compulsions that drive his struggle to survive resolve into even more bizarre and taboo-breaking behaviour. He is established from the outset of the novel as something of a voyeur, and his compulsion to spy upon other people leads to his discovery of a car which contains the bodies of a young couple who have died, presumably, of asphyxiation. Compelled by an urge that has not hitherto been signalled in the text, Ballard molests the corpse of the young woman before retreating. As an afterthought, he returns to the car to steal money and other belongings from the couple, before returning to the car for a second time to steal the woman’s body away to his dilapidated cabin. The girl’s body becomes his companion who he speaks to as well as dressing and posing like a doll until his ad hoc home is destroyed by a fire and her corpse is immolated. Ballard later intentionally burns down the dumpkeeper’s house after one of the daughters declines his advances, killing her and, most heinously, the ‘idiot child’ who is also in the house. From there Ballard continues on a campaign of murder and necrophilia, preying on couples that park their cars for clandestine meetings on the remote Frog Mountain

turnaround and takes up a kind of deathly habitation in an underground cave in which he dwells with the corpses of his victims.

Though it would be fair to call almost every other character that appears in the novel an antagonist, opposition to Ballard comes principally on the part of two figures. The first is John Greer, the man who now inhabits Ballard’s family home, and to whom Ballard makes frequent journeys to spy on and curse. The other is the High Sheriff of Sevier County—the splendidly named Fate Turner—whose instinctual dislike of Ballard turns to suspicion when citizens start to go missing. Ballard is jailed on spurious and

unsubstantiated charges, but is released to wreak more havoc, surviving even a near drowning when a biblical flood flushes him out of his subterranean retreat. He is apprehended again when he is shot down in his attempt to

murder John Greer. Having lost an arm in the gunfire, he is awoken in hospital by a band of vigilantes who demand that he lead them to where the bodies of his victims are located. He eventually concedes, though he manages to use his knowledge of the dark underground caves through which he leads them to cut loose from the gang, although the escape fails as he too becomes hopelessly lost darkness. After three days spent wandering blindly in this underworld, Ballard eventually emerges from the ground in time to have a brief but benign encounter with a child before taking himself to the county hospital, where he presents himself with the enigmatic words ‘I’m supposed to be here’ (182).

The concluding chapters move us beyond the time of the murders to report that Ballard was never indicted for any crime, though he spent the remainder of his life in custody at the psychiatric hospital where he died. In death, Lester’s body is dissected and disassembled by medical students before being buried ‘with others of his kind’ in ‘a cemetery outside the city’ (183-4).

Sometime thereafter, a farmer ploughing land causes a great fracture in the

earth and the cave containing the decaying bodies of Ballard’s victims is exposed. The novel concludes with Sheriff Fate and his assistants exhuming the bodies for transportation.

A summary account of the synopsis could not do justice to the thematic richness and creative inquisitiveness of McCarthy’s third novel. Although it has to be admitted that the gross unpleasantness of Child of God connects it to the prurient pulp horror novels of its era—and the work even seems to court the company of authors such as Robert Bloch and the young Steven King—it strives successfully to hold itself apart from this kind of exploitation fiction.

McCarthy clearly maintains a higher valuation of the grotesque and the Gothic and his treatment of images of transgression, physical deformity, death and decay, are presented with the sensitivity to the texture of reality that is a staple of the southern tradition and to the finest American writing. However, the key element that prevents McCarthy’s third novel from being just another pulpy horror story is the presentation of Ballard himself. He is never allowed to be just a spook or an object of puerile curiosity, but is presented as a creature who is at once extraordinary and sympathetic. He is an allegorical character in possession of a compelling depth of personality, and, indeed, he proves to be a figure in whom so many of the tensions and ambivalences that the author wishes to describe are concentrated. At once an enigma and a familiar in his form, his attitude and his actions, Lester is given to us as object of apparently inexhaustible interest— a case for close study and a fellow who deserves our acts of witnessing, affirmed by the frequent rhetorical requests for us to ‘see him’ and to consider how he himself sees the world. However, it is never

clear whether our attention is demanded in order that we may know him (and by extension, know ourselves), or in order that we might know him (or ourselves) to be unknowable.

In its reaching for intensities of horror and mystery, Child of God follows on quite naturally from the excesses of Outer Dark,⁹⁸ though it strikes us immediately as a different kind of novel. Most noticeably, in Child of God we see McCarthy pulling back on the excessively mythical setting of Outer Dark and regaining a more secure footing in the historical and geographical realities of its Southern setting. The story takes place in Sevier County, Tennessee in the 1960’s and uses a number of the physical landmarks of the region as settings for events, as well as colouring the action with the sights and sounds which lend a sense of cultural authenticity, not least the rural

Appalachian music and country gospel songs which drift through the tale. The latter is especially appropriate, since Sevier County is inscribed on the

landscape of modern American culture as the birthplace of Dolly Parton—

eulogised in her signature song ‘My Tennessee Mountain Home’.⁹⁹ McCarthy’s tale stands as a contrasting counter-narrative to the nostalgic pastoralism of Parton’s lyric—indeed, the term ‘anti-pastoral’ would seem apt to describe McCarthy’s less than idyllic evocation of the place, with its

attention to general and particular instances of waste, violence and moral decrepitude.

98 There are a few more low-key thematic continuities that are indicative of the proximity of the two novels. For example, Lester Ballard’s feet are frequently an object of interest, though admittedly not to the same extent as were Culla’s.

99 It is an intriguing fact that both Parton’s recording and Child of God were both released in the same year, and that the respective pastoral and ‘anti-pastoral’ vision of these works should together remain the two most-high profile instances of Sevier County’s acknowledgement in popular culture.

McCarthy has even suggested, tantalisingly, that the story was inspired by real events in the region and this sense of the narrative as an authoritative record—however apocryphal—is a feature of the text, which often takes up the guise of an oral history. Much of the story is narrated by at least two anonymous characters, for whom Ballard seems to be an established figure in local lore, and their recollections are presented in demotic and occasionally humorous tones that give us glimpses of them as humane personalities who populate the novel whilst they are not, for the most part, involved in the story itself. Their testimonies are woven in with McCarthy’s characteristic lofty voice of narratorial omniscience which holds the fullness of the story together, though this voice too is at times engagingly conversational, addressing the reader with instructions to consider this or that detail or to query the reason or credibility of some of the extraordinary events it describes. This hewing together of voices, images and events is of a piece with the novel’s broader aesthetic, which moves on from the ‘dualistic’ conceit of Outer Dark to investigate the coincidence of word and matter.

Together with its more subdued mythical qualities, this novel also exhibits considerable restraint in the presentation of the text itself, which is characterised by a brevity which eschews the dreamy weirdness of Outer Dark (and also the Joycean sprawl of Suttree—which McCarthy was writing

contemporaneously with Child of God). Overall, Child of God is one of McCarthy’s shortest novels, running to less than 200 pages. Its three

numbered parts are comprised of short chapters that are frequently less than two pages long, and rarely stretch beyond five or six. It also forgoes, for the most part, at least, the complicated and extended syntax that is otherwise

characteristic of McCarthy’s Tennessee novels. Here McCarthy prefers short and unfussy arrangements which lend the work a tone of precision that is quite distinctive to itself, though perhaps offering intimations of the adventures in syntactic contraction which emerge through the Border Trilogy and then come to distinguish the later novels No Country for Old Men and The Road. Indeed, McCarthy often commences chapters or sections with reports of action or setting that are often so contracted as to resemble stage directions, for example: ‘Ballard among the fairgoers stepping gingerly through the mud’

(58); or, ‘Ballard shopping’ (91). All of this seems to be of a piece with the general conceit of the novel which is to present the reader not with spectacles of activity achieved by excessive verbiage, but with snapshots or tableaux that invite close and sober inspection of the subject at the centre of the tale and of the vision of the world to which he bears testimony.

In the woods and in men’s soul: Ballard’s pursuit of order

For all its pursuit of an economy and precision of language, Child of God does not forfeit the mythical tenor and rich allusiveness that are the hallmark of McCarthy’s fiction. The author’s characteristically grave concerns are all present and are examined through a refraction of diverse biblical,

philosophical and literary texts and traditions. The Melvillean coincidence of the elements of tragedy and romance are quite easily discerned in the character of Lester Ballard. He is an Ishmael-like figure: fatherless, uprooted and

compelled to make a quest into a natural and spiritual wilderness, or a movement into the abyss. And although the record of his undertakings bears

many stock features of the pulp horror novel, there is also a case that the work should be read as a Bildungsroman, albeit an unconventional one, as the texts urges us to make our assessments concerning the development of Lester’s character. The narration of Ballard’s life describes the traumas of his early formation, his progress through increasing brutality and decreasing sanity, and a subsequent ‘rebirth’ or awakening to a new consciousness or shift in his directing passions, giving the reader occasion to ponder the circumstances and perhaps the barely discernible forces that guarantee his deliverance. In respect of this theme, the novel is deeply involved in Christian mythos and the theme of katabasis. Ballard’s movement through caves makes an explicit connection to the katabatic literature of antiquity, although T. S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’ is also an especially important proof text. Indeed, we might see that the

Heraclitean epigraph that Eliot appends to his Four Quartets—‘the way upward and the way downward are one and the same’¹⁰⁰—as something of a key to how we may assess Ballard’s descent as an inversion or perverse

‘imitation of Christ’ and of his more sympathetically humane ideals generally.

It is on account of his perverse idiosyncrasy that Ballard is, equally, something of a Captain Ahab—a tragic hero-villain in whom elements of Job, Oedipus and Prometheus are combined. He is an abject and afflicted figure, who sublimates a hyper-awareness of the very real possibility of his

eradication into a fierce will to power. Certain clues in the text that work to kindle our sympathy for Ballard, together with the measure of interpretative generosity that such details elicit, enable us to frame his transgressions as rebellious attempts to contest the impersonal forces that press upon him, and

100 T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” in Collected Poems 1909-1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), 177-83.

to thereby affirm a sense of justice and of an order that seems absent in the given world. As though to signal the affinity between his hero-villain and Ahab, McCarthy even has Lester lose a limb in his confrontation with his perceived oppressors. However, Ballard is in some important respects a diminished replica, or more fairly perhaps, a creatively ‘misread’ recreation.

Unlike Melville’s imposing Ahab, Lester’s character and his motivations are distinguished by stark limitations of language and capacity. His speech is brusque, limited to small eruptions of profanity and invective, and so could never attain the exhilarating confections of blasphemy that make Ahab—or, for that matter, Sophocles’ Oedipus—such a fascinating character. Yet, although Ballard lacks the grandiosity of Ahab’s mind and speech,

McCarthy’s text persuades us that his utterances merit attention, such that they might enlarge our understanding of the bare facts of his brutal actions, and that a subtle and sympathetic impulse is dominant and determinative even in the mind of this meanest of fellows. Against expectations, the text entertains the possibility that Ballard’s errant life is the precondition for the achievement of some subtle wisdom, and that he may perhaps also induct us into a deeper awareness of the human condition and its involvement with the natural and divine order of the world in which we have our being.

Creation and cosmic order, evil and death, along with fate and providence are all examined in the novel, though in this tale, McCarthy’s metaphysical framework is notably different from that which seemed so constitutive of the vision of Outer Dark. The dualism of word and flesh, name and nature (Gnostic or Johannine) is, for the most part, displaced by a greater feeling for a richer sense of the real in which material and spiritual reality are

alloyed, and it is within this framework that the motifs of katabasis, theurgy and divination which occur in the narrative achieve their force. In a perceptive reading of the novel’s thematic organisation, Andrew Bartlett notes the

assembled motifs of vision: ‘Hunting, tracking, sighting, looking, searching, exploring, examining—such processes dominate the story’.¹⁰¹ Spiritual truth and spiritual gratification—erroneous or not—are sought through the

examination of material reality and the things of this world. More precisely stated, we should see the dramatic thrust of the novel as a contest or process of transition in which Ballard’s Ahab-like dualistic imagination propels him to acts of tragic hubris, before it is sublimated into a subtler vision.

McCarthy structures this metaphysical drama by staging oppositions

McCarthy structures this metaphysical drama by staging oppositions