Blog 129 - Cormac McCarthy's "Suttree" and non-human life

 

American writer Cormac McCarthy is probably best known to the general public through the films made of his novels No Country for Old Men (Javier Bardem with that dreadful hairstyle and stun-gun), or All the Pretty Horses (Matt Damon dashing on horseback), or The Road (Viggo Mortensen in quite possibly the bleakest futuristic story ever told). What can’t be filmed is McCarthy’s language – extraordinarily rich, even overwrought, laced with resonant archaisms, grammatical oddities and invented colloquialisms. Blood Meridian, probably the most influential of his novels (at least two South African writers have consciously tried to mimic its inimitable style), is exemplary in this regard. You’ll never see the Sonoran desert, or indeed any desert, the same way again, or think of the aesthetics of violence the same way either.

But my favourite McCarthy novel is Suttree (1979), acknowledged by some readers as his masterpiece. Unusually for him, it’s set in a city – 1950s Knoxville, Tennessee – and unusually for him his main character is quite likeable, compassionate despite being radically dislocated. I’d hazard that if the novel has a central theme, it’s the persistence of compassion, of a certain ragged and rugged community loyalty, in the face of unpromising, even apocalyptic, circumstances. Ex-jailbird Cornelius Suttree is surviving by fishing the sludgy backwaters of Knoxville’s river. He occupies a decaying houseboat on the edge of McAnally Flats, an impoverished slum of broken architectures, car wrecks, weeds, washed-up vagrants and the aged, often black, cast-offs of the American city. The area’s name, with its echo of anal, matches the “cloaca maxima” of the oil- and slaughterhouse-polluted river; the place is neck-deep in trash, meticulously observed. Suttree walks about a lot, mostly abstains from systemic drunkenness and endemic criminality, drifts in and out of solvency and, within his means, dispenses help and money to his fellows, in a gritty and unsentimental way.

McCarthy’s extensive descriptions of landscapes generally have lent themselves to ecologically-orientated readings, or “ecocriticism” – not least of all those in Suttree. Ecocriticism, as a school of approaches aimed at bringing to light and interrogating human relations with the natural world, has proliferated into various sub-branches. One increasingly popular branch aims to dislodge the human or anthropocentric perspective in favour of an ecocentric one. It wants to knock humanity off its alleged pedestal of dominant uniqueness and to view it rather as just one amongst a multitude of other creatures, all networked together in an infinite variety of ways. A burgeoning sub-school of so-called Critical Animal Studies asserts that other animals are equally unique and valid centres of consciousness and agency, and their roles need to be acknowledged in our readings (and writing) of literary works. Even more recent is Critical Plant Studies: maybe plants have a proto-consciousness, too, or at least are responsive to network ‘signals’ of some sort. In any event, there they are, and we are wholly dependent on them.

Now Animal and Plant studies are being enveloped by “multispecies” perspectives. So far, this has been pursued more in ethnography and anthropology, but is making its way into literary studies, too. It draws partly on Darwinian and post-Darwinian evolutionary theories; in this view we are just a twig on the great “tree of life”, which envisions species branching endlessly away from one another in a riot of inadvertent creativity. More recent microbiological science complicates this picture. Intra-cellular mitochondrial studies by Lynn Margulis and her acolytes have gradually persuaded biologists that across the “vertical” twiglets of the evolutionary tree, viruses and bacteria can cross from species to species, hijacking cells and turning them to unexpected uses via so-called “horizontal gene transfer”. It’s suddenly now a very “tangled tree”, to borrow the title of David Quammen’s rather irritatingly chatty book on the subject. This holds true of our own bodies. It has long been known that we share 96% of our genes with the great apes, 70% with bananas. Leading ecocritical thinker Donna Haraway is fond of reminding us that only about 10% of our body’s cells contain uniquely human DNA: the vast majority is commanded by bacterial, microbial, viral material. Not to mention a plethora of parasites, from worms to skin mites. We are, each one of us, already a multispecies entity. It all makes deciding what our allegedly unique “self” really is, or even, in some extreme views, if it exists at all. At any rate, that we do live in a multispecies world is an indisputable fact. That our very existence depends upon a multispecies network is also a fact. Attitudes towards those facts, however, can vary and conflict.

Is all this relevant to Suttree? I think so. Of course, others have latched onto ecocritical readings of McCarthy long before Ol’ Slow-boat Wylie here chugged up the river. But no discussions I’ve seen so far go into Suttree’s multi-species dimension. Scholars highlight the novel’s environment of historically layered trash and industrial pollution; some of the animal presences; America’s obsession with the car as the primary manifestation of Cartesian rationalism and environment-destroying technology; and the social-justice consequences of ecological degradation. All well and good, but still rather anthropocentric. Yet it seems to me that a multispecies reading of Suttree is unavoidable, in fact essential to its main themes. The novel is saturated with non-human presences, from weeds to bees, from pigeons to catfish, from cats to honeysuckle, from newts to moulds. This riot of life has its own history, on a geological scale. Here is a typical passage from the very first page:

Old stone walls unplumbed by weathers, lodged in their striae fossil bones, limestone scarabs rucked in the floor of this once inland sea. Thin dark trees through yon iron palings where the dead keep their own small metropolis … the deathware stained with carrion. … Past these corrugated warehouse walls down little sandy streets where blownout autos sulk on pedestals of cinderblock. Through warrens of sumac and pokeweed and withered honeysuckle giving onto the scored clay banks of the railway. Grey vines coiled leftward in this northern hemisphere, what winds them shapes the dogwhelk’s shell. Weeds sprouted from cinder and brick. A steamshovel reared in solitary abandonment against the night sky. Cross here. By frograils and fishplates where engines cough like lions in the dark of the yard. To a darker town, past lamps stoned blind, past smoking oblique shacks and china dogs and painted tires where dirty flowers grow.

So much is going on here. Primordial fossils lie alongside the recent dead. Vines, shells (and everything else, it’s implied) obey the same implacable laws of nature. Even the machinery partakes of the animal. All is subject to a “slow cataclysm of neglect”, though natural life paradoxically flourishes. In this “encampment of the damned”, shaped by “wave on wave of the violent and insane”, only “ruder forms survive”. Suttree himself, who is both rude and somewhat educated, seems almost indestructible.

Some of the ecocentric thinking I outlined earlier is rather utopian in tenor. Though the predatory dimension of Nature may be paid some lip service, there’s an underlying hopefulness: If only humans were no longer seeing themselves at the top of the pile and as ultimately privileged, but rather as networked in some sort of ecological equality with multiple others, somehow a better, more respectful world will emerge. Somehow anthropogenic damage to our environment will be mitigated. I like the thought but am not convinced. It seems to me that this idea in itself emerges from conditions of coddled privilege. What happens to multispecies co-existence in conditions of extreme poverty, where there are few margins for error, little education, and thin soil for compassion? Suttree seems to encapsulate just such a world, where emotional engagement with the non-human world is something of a luxury, if it happens at all. These are trash(ed)-humans who are emphatically not at the top of the pile. Similar conditions may be observed in locations across the globe, from the Cape Flats to Mumbai, Lagos to Sao Paolo. This is not an environment in which ideas of beautiful nature, of conservation, or of animal rights, can easily establish.

Take the animals of Suttree, most of which are either untamed or victims. Though the odd character has a pet cat or companionable dog or a bunch of goats, love or caring is rare compared to normalised negligent violence. It’s not so much ‘cruelty’, as that implies a certain deliberate malice; here, the violence is shorn of almost all emotion. The pig slaughterhouse across the river is impersonal; people eat the pork without qualm. Meat hanging in a local market is described as objectively grotesque, but not because Suttree himself expresses any disgust. He kills and guts his catches in apparent complete detachment; just once or twice comes a hint that the fish flopping in the bottom of his skiff might register or feel what they’re going through. At one point Suttree casually throws a stone at a tethered goat, without malice or obvious intent. He also slings mud and stones at a defiant cat angling to steal one of his fish. Another fisherman, an “Indian”, specialises in hunting turtles; the slaughter of one is described in excruciating but entirely dispassionate detail. Harrogate, an unhinged if inventive teenaged criminal whom Suttree half-adopts, poisons bats with strychnine and tries to pass them off as rabid, for a bounty. Suttree does insist on freeing a dog stuck in a neighbour’s slops-barrel, whereas the neighbour is inclined just to leave it. But it’s not clear whether Suttree is concerned to help the dog or the neighbour; there’s no apparent solicitude for the liberated hound.

On the Flats, the fragile contingency of all lives is exposed, those of humans no less than of weeds. In this sense there is a kind of Darwinian democracy at work – or a ‘critterocracy’. Repeatedly these humans are not so much reduced to the animal, as ‘levelled up’ with them. In dozens of instances people are compared to animals: a man is “owlfaced”, youths are energetic as horses, Harrogate is known as the “city mouse”, Suttree himself is like a wandering dog. These examples of simile might be dismissed as merely colourful comparisons, some demeaning and even in today’s perspective downright racist. But there are too many to be merely occasional, and in other instances McCarthy seems to want to meld them more organically: “Suttree looked towards the river and tested the air with his nose in a gesture of some earlier antecedent.” A primordial animality lives within him – a textual analogue to horizontal gene transfer, you might say.

In one brief but significant interlude, Suttree takes an aimless hike up into Tennessee’s forested and snow-topped mountains. Inadequately clad and ill-provisioned, he drives himself to the point of hallucinatory starvation. He experiences something of old-school ‘pure appreciation of nature’, relayed in lyrical terms, an apprehension of “incredible loveliness”:

Old distaff Celt’s blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care.

Here is something like the transcendence of arrogant self-hood that our ecocentric theorists would valorise, but for Suttree it scarcely acts as a life-changing epiphany. He just doesn’t care. It’s too close to hunger-induced derangement, in which he sees “with a madman’s clarity the perishability of his flesh.” A certain wisdom in that, but it’s hard to read McCarthy as wanting us to regard the lovely Thoreau-like vision seriously. It's as ephemeral as any other stance. Suttree can’t survive ‘in Nature’, however beautiful. His starving hallucinations, often nightmarishly multispecies in appearance, will be repeated and amplified later when he falls ill with typhoid (another organism, of course).

In a contrastive interlude Suttree, having befriended a successful prostitute, finds himself in money, an apartment in Knoxville’s city centre, a smart(ish) suit, and even a swanky car. But he becomes even more directionless and disillusioned; this environment is sterile, artificial and faithless. Non-human life is notably absent. Even McCarthy’s prose becomes grey and flat. It all falls apart, and Suttree is soon right back where he was. In effect, McCarthy’s eco-lyricism, precision of observation, awareness of deep history, and lushness of language are reserved for the McAnally Flats. His are the aesthetics of destruction and neglect, a kind of beauty of the apocalyptic – indeed of successive apocalyptic upheavals. At the end of the novel, another one looms: the Flats and their destitute inhabitants, from burdock and rats to people and moths, are being flattened for the sake of an expressway, a concrete-and-girder altar to America’s obsession with the car. The reader suffers a genuine sense of loss: for all its entangled horrors and poverty, McCarthy has rendered the place strangely loveable, partly because of its very precariousness.

In the end Suttree has to leave the Flats, hitch-hiking away through the new and dusty roadworks. In an echo of his own scratchy philanthropy, a boy spontaneously brings him some water. In the closing paragraphs, real and symbolic and hallucinatory animals again define the tenuousness of his being:

Behind him the city lay smoking, the sad purlieus of the dead immured with the bones of friends and forebears. Off to the right side the white concrete of the expressway gleamed in the sun where the ramp curved out into empty air and hung truncate with iron rods bristling among the vectors of nowhere. When he looked back the waterboy was gone. An enormous lank hound had come out of the meadow by the river like a hound from the depths and was sniffing at the spot where Suttree had stood.

            Somewhere in the gray wood by the river is the huntsman and in the brooming corn and in the castellated press of cities. His work lies all wheres and his hounds tire not. I have seen them in a dream, slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world. Fly them.

*****