No More Heroes: Narrative Perspective and Morality in Cormac McCarthy

02 "A Dream of Shriving" Empathy and the Aesthetics of Convession in Suttree and Blood Meridian

2 “A Dream of Shriving” Empathy and the Aesthetics of Confession in Suttree and Blood Meridian The priest gave a little smile, lightly touched with censure, remonstrance gentled. God’s house is not exactly the place to take a nap, he said. It’s not God’s house. I beg your pardon? It’s not God’s house. —cormac mccarthy, Suttree The saint however has his church with him and in him at all places. He goes and stands, he lies down and he sits, in his church. [. . .] The Holy Spirit preaches to him out of each creature; in everything that he sees, he sees God’s preacher. —jacob boehme, The Way to Christ N ear the beginning of Cormac McCarthy’s semiautobiographical novel Suttree (1979), the eponymous Cornelius Suttree, a failed father and an absconded scion of a Knoxville lawyer, gets drunk at a bar and, after proclaiming to a nearby wall, “I’m an asshole,” collapses to the floor, where “[a] dream of shriving c[omes] to him” (77, 78). In other words, following a rather tepid confession of sin—that he is “an asshole”—Suttree is visited by a dream of the Roman Catholic rite of reconciliation and forgiveness. This rite of forgiveness provides brief counterpoints of hope to Suttree’s tragic, fuguelike peregrinations through the slums of Knoxville’s McAnally Flats. Vereen Bell claims that this novel Empathy and Confession in Suttree and Blood Meridian 53 is “one of detranscendence,” that Suttree “detranscends, so to speak, in order to discover a meaningful form of transcendence” (73). Bell’s creative oxymoron captures the strangely luminous quality of Suttree’s dark wanderings in which redemption ultimately remains elusive but, paradoxically, the search for redemption seems to be itself a sanctifying journey. But if Suttree is haunted by his desire to find absolution for his sins, the characters of McCarthy’s subsequent novel, Blood Meridian (1985), seem to exist in a state of absolute disinterest in questions of redemption or reconciliation with God or their fellow creatures. Suttree also reveals the interior life of its protagonist more than does any other McCarthy novel, a striking contrast to the narrative style of Blood Meridian, which reveals no interior mental activity on the part of its vehemently unpenitent characters, making it to date the novel least revelatory of characters’ interior lives in McCarthy’s corpus. An examination of these two novels’ contrasting stylistic depictions and denials of interior life suggests that the novels assume an aesthetic link between confession, empathy, and forgiveness. Suttree, through stylistic revelations of the protagonist’s recognition of his own sin and need for redemption, permits its audience to find some measure of forgiveness for this lost soul, whereas Blood Meridian’s narrative refuses its characters any redemption by insisting that they neither acknowledge their sins nor recognize their need for forgiveness. Despite their obvious aesthetic and thematic differences, Suttree and Blood Meridian both emphasize the critical role of genuine penitence in permitting even the slightest possibility of redemption. Blood Meridian constructs a primitive, ferocious world in which characters behave brutishly , without thought or reflection. Indeed, the epilogue points to the critical absence of any internal “light” and the subsequent pointlessness of any external signs of penitence. In the novel’s final italicized section, unnamed men follow a fire-starter who goes about striking light in the darkness. These unnamed men follow the light, but they “appear restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality” (337). The narrator critiques the empty appearance of wisdom or “reflectiveness” without a corresponding “inner reality” in a way that evokes Suttree’s similar critique of religious forms that are devoid of an internal reality. For example, in Blood Meridian, the unnamed kid is “divested” of his inherited identity, his “origins [. . .] remote as is his destiny” (4). But the kid, having shucked off the trappings of his genetic inheritance, never finds another identity to replace the one he has lost. Blood Meridian’s kid seems to make a journey 54 No More Heroes that is a dark antithesis to the traditional pattern of the bildungsroman, in which a young man leaves his father’s identity and home and ventures into his own future and fortune. This initiating action, the young man’s departure, commences the kid’s unenlightening journey and in fact seems to pick up or mimic the final narrative event in Suttree, in which Suttree...