“Talkin about Lester”: Community, Culpability, and Narrative Suppression in Child of God

TRAVIS FRANKS Arizona State University “Talkin about Lester”: Community, Culpability, and Narrative Suppression in Child of God THE DISCOVERY OF HOMER BARRON’S CORPSE IN THE CLIMACTIC ENDING OF William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” creates one of the story’s most indelible images, one that stays with readers long after the jarring final lines. One manifestation of this scene’s influence can be seen in excised material from Cormac McCarthy’s novel Child of God, which, in an unfinished typescript included in the Cormac McCarthy Papers housed in the Wittliff Collection at Texas State University, contains a scene of discovery remarkably similar to Barron’s, so much so that it involves a character who does not exist at all in the final version of the novel—Lester Ballard’s wife. Indeed, McCarthy’s indebtedness to Faulkner seems to have stymied Child of God.’s progress, creating an imperative for the successor to the Faulknerian tradition to define himself against his forebear rather than merely mimic him. Accordingly, McCarthy produced a novel subtly but only partly in conversation with Faulkner’s story, one that calls into question more directly how communitiestranslatetraumaticeventsintostoriesbyscapegoatingtheir own members. Many readers will no doubt be familiar with the story arc of “A Rose for Emily,” wherein the jilted Emily Grierson is revealed to have, by the story’s end, murdered her suitor Homer Barron and kept his body locked away in her home for decades. My reading suggests that the narration incriminates the community in which Emily lived by making them partly responsible for her descent into madness. Emily’s tale is exclusively narrated by an unnamed member of the community in which the protagonist spends her entire life. Further, the narrator, whom Cleanth Brooks called “a born storyteller” (8), serves as a voice of the community, as evinced by his or her many uses of the first-person pronouns “we” and “our” in describing the community’s perspective. This unnamed narrator has an artist’s attention to detail and a masterful 76 Travis Franks manipulation of time. Much of the story is predicated upon its propulsion to the moment of shock at the end, and though the story should be read for more than the thrilling, horrific discovery in its final line—“a long strand of iron-gray hair” (Faulkner 130)—there is in that fever-pitched moment a sense of catharsis for the narrator. Prompted by the ending, there is a sense that narrator and reader are to revel together in the conclusion of Emily’s spectacle much more than reel from it in disgust. While Emily’s actions are her own, the arc of her life is constructed through a narrative framework meant to shock and delight. The narrator makes this abundantly clear early on in the story: “When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house” (119). She is described as having “been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town” (119). And, in watching the unraveling of her life with vulture-like curiosity, the townspeople eventually abet her crime, making them, at least to some degree, culpable for it. Child of God is perhaps most distinguished by what many contend is a sympathetic rendering of a murderous, necrophiliac protagonist, and the existence of concomitant narrative voices in the novel substantiates this reading. Lester Ballard’s tale is told across three parts, designated I, II, and III. In Part I, McCarthy weaves together first- and third-person narration, the only section of the novel to use this structure. Readers become acquainted with Ballard through a series of loosely connected, biographical sketches rendered by the choric narrators. Through the intermingled chapters of third-person narration, readers also learn of his displacement from his family farm and subsequent harassment by Sheriff Fate Turner which lead him to become further isolated and estranged from his community by seeking refuge in the mountains of Sevier County, Tennessee. Part II begins with Ballard’s discovery of the corpses of two asphyxiated...