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Atavism and the Exploded Metanarrative: Cormac McCarthy's Journey to Mythoclasm
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
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ATAVISM AND THE EXPLODED METANARRATIVE CormacAlcG?r(/rys Journey to Mylboclnsm n 1975 Vanderbilt critic and novelist Walter Sullivan, delivering the eighteenth annual Lamar Lectures at Mercer University, assessed the state of fiction in the modern South. His lecture was entitled "A Requiem for the Renascence ," and in reviewing contemporary southern fiction he found little cause for optimism. Southern writing, he declared, had lost its sense of the universal and consequently suffered from the "naturalistic excesses" that accompany a loss of faith (Requiem 69). In contrast to Renascence authors, southern writers of the 1960s and 1970s offered no organic conception of the region, and the poetics of their works suffered from the lack of a unified vision. In both form and philosophy, they violated the New Critical and conservative principles that Sullivan had acquired and propounded in his many years of association with the Vanderbilt English department. The current scene, Sullivan believed, could be described with the metaphor of the "rainbow's end." Contemporary writers paled in comparison to their predecessors, and many of them seemed intent on undermining the modernist achievement in southern letters. The state of fiction could be described in terms ranging from "decayed" to "barbarous" (50, 72). The particular target of Sullivan's criticism was Cormac McCarthy. McCar91 I 92 Cormac McCarthy's Journey to Mythoclasm thy seemed to represent each of the literary offenses that threatened southern fiction. While Sullivan admonished Walker Percy for his uncertain faith and rebuked James Dickey for the sensational gothicism of some of his work, McCarthy elicited an almost frantic level of vitriol—as if he posed a threat to the entire achievement of the Renascence. Even if one considers that some of Sullivan 's comments may have been grounded in the hyperbolic style that Louis Rubin calls "Vanderbilt apocalyptic," his criticism is revealing. It is indicativeof the tensions at work in southern fiction's shift from the modern to the postmodern , a conflict in which McCarthy's work is fully embroiled. Sullivan'scomments demonstrate the firm hold that late modernism maintained on southern fiction and criticism well into McCarthy's career, as well as the tribulations faced by the southern writer of postmodern sensibilitywho departed from the traditional style of the modern southern novel. Sullivan's criticism of McCarthy in A Requiem for theRenascence intensifies as he considers this development from novel to novel. His escalating critique represents in microcosm the unwillingness of the old guard of southern literati to accommodate younger writers of iconoclastic vision. At the heart of Sullivan's criticism lies his resistance to McCarthy 's mythoclastic strain, an inimical attitude toward southern cultural mythology that has intensified as McCarthy's artistic prowess has developed. In his atavistic depictions of humanity and parodic or critical treatment of cultural fixturesof the southern literary landscape, McCarthy writes against the modernist and humanistic philosophy to which Sullivan adheres. Thus in his career— and in Sullivan's reaction to it—we may observe a clearly delineated struggle between modern and postmodern, old and new, in the evolving landscape of southern literature.1 Initially, Sullivan welcomed McCarthy as a formidable new talent. Perhaps because of the Faulknerian prose and pastoral elements of The Orchard Keeper (1965), Sullivan perceived McCarthy's first novel as a valuable contribution to southern letters: "His characters come immediately alive. He has a fine sense of dramatic scene and pacing and an ability to reproduce the countryside of east Tennessee where his fiction is set. In The Orchard Keeper he pursues a familiar theme: he charts the depredations of time and shows how old ways are doomed by the new. No southern novelist since William Styron has got off to a better start" (70). But this approval was short-lived. McCarthy's meditations on history proved to be far different from Styron's—and much more inimical to the tradition of the Renascence. Sullivan continues-. "Butin his second book [Outer Dark], McCarthy told a weird, almost gothic tale of incest and his third novel [Child of [100.26.140.179] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:45 GMT) Cormac McCarthy's Journey to Mythoclasm 93 God] is clear evidence of the plane of madness to which our art has finally descended," an "affront to decency on every level" (70, 71). At the time of Sullivan's Lamar Lectures, McCarthy had not yet consummated his southern vision with the 1978 masterpiece Suttree, and Child of Godrepresented the fullest expression of his mythoclastic vision—and consequently received Sullivan's...