Cormac McCarthy: New Directions

“Hallucinated Recollections”: Narrative as Spatialized Perception of History in The Orchard Keeper

The tree was down and cut to lengths, the sections spread and jumbled over the grass. C ormac McCarthy begins the first fragment of The Orchard Keeper with this condensed image of perceived history, giving shape to the passage of time, representing how human hindsight objectifies the passage of time. As a metaphor that illustrates the disintegration of historical continuity, the fallen tree, with its pieces still somehow reminiscent of a majestic coherence, signals McCarthy’s use of disjunct episodes to narrate his novel. Even the syntax of the first line reflects a concern with the dissection and breakdown of order. The sentence, composed of sixteen words split down the middle with a comma, mimics the tension between two opposing forces. Whereas the first eight words adhere to iambic tetrameter, McCarthy subjects the second half to a metrical meltdown, initiated by the word “jumbled.” This juxtaposition of rhythmic order and dissolution denies the potential for poetic balance, asserts the reality of collapse, and reinforces the elusive but inherent boundary between the two. Both the image and “Hallucinated Recollections” Narrative as Spatialized Perception of History in The Orchard Keeper Matthew R. Horton 285 286 : Matthew R. Horton the language that creates it, therefore, draw the reader into a broken world of divisions and borders where fragmentation overwhelms holistic perception. Indeed, the tree has been sliced into segments that are “spread and jumbled,” which anticipates the fractured surface and disordered sequence of the narrative to follow: the tree segments symbolize remnants of an untold story. To tell it, McCarthy abandons the ordered wholeness of the tree and chops it into smaller and more manageable wedges, which he intricately displaces and rearranges into stacks; consequently, he constructs a network of episodes that reshapes chronologically intact history. If this initial metaphor for storytelling generates tension between coherence and disorder, it does so in part by bridging the apparent perceptual gap separating time and space. McCarthy projects a temporal concept (history) through a spatial lens (tree fragments) and so foregrounds distortion as an integral part of conveying historical perception. The fallen and fragmented tree represents the mind of man struggling to recollect and reassemble the past. Just as the scattered segments indicate that the tree has been fractured, so must the events and sensations of a story told about the past be extracts from the temporal order of sequential history. But McCarthy’s style of storytelling , his narrative technique, goes beyond the idea of distortion as a consequence of limited memory. He deliberately warps conventional appearance, reveals multiple dimensions of perception, and jumbles the sequence of his narrative to simulate how man reconceives the past within memory. Thus, the aesthetic engine of storytelling gives birth to and is sustained by distortion, the predominant means by which McCarthy undermines the boundary between time and space and uncovers the structures that exist hidden within chronology. As a result, the narration of The Orchard Keeper generates shapes that are difficult to see, and the reader must adopt the kind of vision that apprehends form, recognizes shifts in angles of perspective, tracks the intersections of plot lines, discovers patterns of imagery and theme, and synthesizes disjunct but simultaneous fragments of action. The need for these strategies suggests one of McCarthy’s aesthetic kinships with modernism and the tradition of spatial form. James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922),Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), and William 287 : “Hallucinated Recollections” Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) demand a reading technique that can untangle and unfold their fragmented, self-regurgitating, and overlapping texts. In 1945, Joseph Frank used the term spatial form to propose that modern authors “intend the reader to apprehend their work spatially, in a moment of time, rather than as a sequence” (10). The “principle of reflexive reference,” which Frank upholds as the dominant structural element in modern literature, suggests that the reader must suspend attention to the temporal sequence of narrative long enough to identify the spatial relationships between different units of meaning in the text (15).1 Because he published The Orchard Keeper in 1965, it is historically erroneous to define McCarthy as a “modernist.” However, his episodic narrative style and his simulation of thought processes and perceptual activity with syntax and form link him to the influences of that experimental period. The “spread and jumbled” sequence of The Orchard Keeper requires the reader to stand above the order of words and discern how McCarthy reshapes...