In the Academy Award-winning film "The Old Man Has Nothing to Rely on," there is a serial killer destined to stay in film history: he is "polite and principled," usually gentle in conversation with people, and decides whether to do it by tossing a coin before killing. This is an impressive and creepy killer, his violence and cruelty are insoluble, and human life and death are only the opposite of the coin for him.
The film brought the Coen brothers great fame to the directors, while Cormac McCarthy, the original author who created the killer, was almost overstated. Hailed as a representative writer of Southern literature who is in line with William Faulkner and Frankri O'Connor, McCarthy, who is nearly 90 years old, is still working hard, writing ten works of different genre styles, and will still publish two new books this fall.
McCarthy's work is often filled with chilling violence and gore, but beneath these remarkable styles lies a richer possibility of humanity and morality. In the republic's recently published "semi-autobiographical" novel "Sutri", which is also one of McCarthy's earlier works " Southern Quartet " , his previously unseen analysis of his own experiences, as well as observations and reflections on the social environment, has written several equally vivid and memorable characters. The article shared today is a book review by Yang Yi, the translator of Sutri and "Son of God". In McCarthy's writing, the South is a gloomy, death-ridden place, and as the translator points out, "Here McCarthy he did not mean to revive the South, but to end the South, just as he later went to end the West." ”
Sutri: He thought he was born a sinner
Wen 丨 Yang Yi
01.
Sutri and McCarthy: Half an Autobiography
Sutri considered himself a sinner by birth. His twin brother died at birth, and Sutri felt he should not be alive.
If you are a sinner, how can you live? This is a classic topic in American literature, after all, the American nation was developed from the Puritans, and the consciousness of original sin has long been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. The famous book "The Red Letter" by the 19th-century American novel master Nathaniel Hawthorne tells people that the punishment of sin can summon up the courage of life to achieve self-salvation, and his Hyster is beautiful and strong, dares to love and hate, although humiliated by the world, it exudes the glory of the Virgin, which is sympathetic. As the protagonist of McCarthy's fourth novel, Sutri clearly chose a different path: he wanted to hide in his own little world.
The Scarlet Letter
A few years ago, there was a popular Japanese drama called "Escape Is Shameful but Useful", so is Sutri's escape useful? When reading this work, you may wish to take this question. But what is certain is that he is not ashamed of escaping, he is even more ashamed to be with his family. The first family member he meets in the novel is his uncle John, whom he dislikes, who is an alcoholic and has a serious liver disease, but this is not the source of disgust, what he hates is the blood from the family, as his grandfather predicted, "blood determines everything", and he has inferior genes in his blood. Sutri's father was born into a celebrity, and his mother was a servant, and no matter how the two were combined, the shadow of the parental relationship on Sutri was enormous, especially his father, who always treated his wife and his wife's mother's family with a lofty gesture of grace, and he told little Sutri that "if a man marries a wife of a lower status than himself, his children will be worse than himself", so Sutri always felt that his father looked down on him. He may not really agree with his father's point of view, but he is afraid of contact with his mother, especially when others say that he is a bit like his uncle, and both have problems with alcoholism, which seems to confirm the genetic determinism, which makes his situation at home very embarrassing. With his father's shadow lingering, Sutri had to cut off all ties with his family and opt for self-exile.
Suttree (1979) is a semi-autobiographical novel that McCarthy spent nearly two decades working on, having lived in Knoxville, Tennessee, where the center stage is set, and many of the streets, addresses, and characters involved are real archetypes. Like Sutri, McCarthy had the experience of abandoning his birth and living in poverty. Born in Providence, the capital of Rhode Island, he moved his family to Martin Mill Pike 5501 in Knoxville at the age of four. His father, Charles McCarthy, graduated from Yale University as a lawyer and later served as legal counsel to the Tennessee River Basin Authority (TVA), the organization responsible for comprehensive management and comprehensive development of the Tennessee Valley in Roosevelt's New Deal during the Great Depression, represented by the construction and reconstruction of more than twenty dams, which were used for flood control, waterway management, and power generation, which led to the economic development of the basin and constituted a famous landscape on the Tennessee River, in "The Long Road" In the middle, you will see the protagonist father and son pass by and look at one of them, the Norris Dam, from the observation deck. McCarthy's father was involved in the relocation of the watershed, and he wrote theoretical articles on the legality of the project during the project and the loss of farmers' land rights. To outsiders, Charles McCarthy was a decent man, a wealthy man, a learned man, and a kind heart, but that doesn't mean mcCarthy's father was the same. Similar to Sutri, he also embarked on a very different path in life than his father.
Latter-Day Danger, 2009
Adapted from "The Long Road"
The first half of McCarthy's life was about disappointing his parents' expectations. Charles McCarthy and Gladys McClaire McCarthy have six children, of whom Cormac McCarthy is the third oldest and has two older sisters: Jackie and Bobby. Faced with the birth of their eldest son, the McCarthys decided to let him inherit his father's name, also known as Charles. As for whether it was the parents or the writers themselves who later changed their names to Cormac, there is no definite result. In 1951, McCarthy enrolled at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, majoring in liberal arts, but only a year later he left the school and joined the U.S. Air Force in 1953, beginning a four-year period of military service.
In 1957, McCarthy returned to the University of Tennessee to continue his studies and began writing, and it was at this time that he began writing both Overwatch Orchard and Sutri. In 1961, he dropped out of college again and never returned. His novels did not achieve real commercial success until "The Horse Under the Heavens", and before that he often lived a life of poverty, moving repeatedly, living in farmhouses, pig farms, milking parlors, and stone houses built by himself. His first two wives recalled the years as miserable, like eating beans.
Cormac McCarthy (1933—)
In the novel, Sutri also immerses himself in a life full of variables. He lived in a houseboat on the Tennessee River, lived by fishing and selling fish, and spent his time in the streets and alleys, making friends with drunkards, peddlers, assholes, tramps, criminals, prostitutes, Indians, witches, and the like, believing in having fun in time, making money and spending it immediately, not planning for tomorrow at all, and life and death became random. There is a chapter in the novel dedicated to the poor people spending the winter, the houseboat has no heating, the rent can not come up with money, it is easy to find one, a small stove surrounds a group of people, everyone is dead, stubborn and secretive, just reading the text can feel the cold and despair. There is also a waiter, every three or five minutes to the street to touch the porcelain car, lose money to gamble and drink, limp in the tavern to work. There is no doubt that these friends of Sutri are the "helpless and incompetent" in his father's eyes, with no legitimate occupation and no social responsibility.
In his final letter to his son, he cautioned that "the world is run by those who are willing to take responsibility" and that life can be found "in the courts, in the company, in the government," but that "nothing happens on the streets." It was in this group, however, that Sutri had a strong sense of identity and belonging, and almost everyone who came into contact with him liked him and even adored him, which was never seen in the protagonists of McCarthy's other works. We can't be sure that McCarthy's father said a similar point, but when creating the father figure in the novel, he should have thought about the different forms and consequences of life, so as to create such a hidden character that only exists in the mouths of others, but dominates the development of the protagonist's character and destiny.
02.
Beneath the surface of the aesthetics of violence
More possibilities for human nature and morality
In fact, thinking about father and son and related issues has always run through McCarthy's writing, in a sense he wrote about coming-of-age novels. Reading McCarthy's work, you may be drawn to the ubiquity of violence, gore, and grotesqueness, but beneath these surface texts he sets up timeless topics to explore the potential and possibilities of humanity and morality in the midst of the horrors that push the limits. For example, the relationship between father and son is reflected to varying degrees in McCarthy's published 10 novels (McCarthy will have two new works coming out by the end of this year), and almost all of them have elders playing the role of spiritual mentors, teaching young protagonists, and ultimately influencing the latter's choice of life path.
John Wesley in "Watchman's Orchard" has a biological father who abandons his son and steals and fights, and he has been taught by Marion, but he does not know that the fake father killed the real father. Kura in Outer Darkness is a young father who commits the crime of abandonment, and his parents are absent throughout the novel. In "Son of God", Ballard's father hangs himself in the beginning, leaving his son to fend for himself, the old man who moves into his old house drives away the former owner with a gun, and the childlike Parrad learns the survival law of defending property by force, but no one reminds him to obtain wealth legally first. The child in Blood Meridian runs away from home and is instilled in the logic of war by the spiritual leader judge in the Scalp Hunters, and the perverted character who plays the father ends his growth without being able to stop the child from going his own way. Cole in "The Horse of the World" also has a decadent biological father who suffered trauma from World War II, and after going to Mexico to chase the cowboy dream, he was not only taught to be a man by his sweetheart's father and aunt, but also recognized the social reality from the prison boss. Bill, another protagonist of the Border Trilogy, has an unknown relationship with his parents, and they are killed when Bill first goes to Mexico, and the story comes out early. Bill had many exchanges during his travels with storied elders, such as blind former revolutionaries, Mormon hermits, etc., who had been cared for by these strangers and received advice from them, and he became a witness and narrator of history at the end of the trilogy. In "The Old Man", the old sheriff Bell and Moss, who are also human observers, are representatives of the two generations, and Bell's contemplative monologue is the father's lament and compassion for the survival of culture. Not to mention in "The Long Road", the protagonist is a father and son, who redeem each other after the disaster and eventually grow up.
"The Old Man Has Nothing to Rely On"
There are multiple paternal relationships in Sutri, but all of them fail. The first is the biological paternity, Sutri does not associate with his father, and abandons his former lover, until the son dies and remembers his father's identity. A tragic father-son affair also happened to his friend Leonard, who hid his dead father in the back room in order to deceive the government subsidy, and then forced Sutri to hastily sink his biological father to the bottom of the water with him when it was hot and smelly. In McCarthy's writing, the father-son relationship seems to be spiritual and social, and he himself was not very good at dealing with his own son when he was young, and after divorcing his first wife, he rarely saw his eldest son, Cullen, and the two did not get close again until the nineties. After entering the flower armor, McCarthy and his third wife gave birth to a youngest son, John, who doted on this son, and those who knew him well said that he "had a feeling of wanting to make up for the mistakes made by his early parents", and this father-son relationship also inspired him to create a particularly touching "Long Road".
Abel Jones, a black man who runs taverns on the Tennessee River, is more like the father of Sutri's life, imperfect, but trusted and respected by Sutri. The name Abel is derived from a biblical figure who was thrown into the furnace because of racial persecution. In Abel Jones, the deep-seated racial discrimination in the American South is most directly reflected, and he has been provoked by white people and offended by the police all his life, and has been imprisoned, and what is even more frightening is that this situation has not changed for forty years. Sharing his life experience, he taught Sutri how to survive in the lower world of Knoxville, facing institutionalized class contradictions and racial hatred, he told Sutri that violent fighting was futile and foolish, "nothing but a blossoming head", and to avoid it as much as possible rather than join in. This young and old, black and white, all drifting on the big river, understanding each other and taking care of each other, it is difficult not to remind people of the adventures of the American national "wild child" Huckleberry Finn and The Black Slave Jim on the Mississippi River. Unfortunately, Jones is involved in an inexplicable violence and is beaten to death by Knoxville police, thus failing to complete his redemption of Sutri.
Harrogate's "Home," source Searching for Suttree
"Harrogate walked through this abandoned wonderland towards the last few cement holes of the viaduct, where the ground was underneath." (Sutri, p173)
Eighteen-year-old Harrogate is another important character in the book, and in him Sutri tries to fulfill his father-brother teaching obligations. This freewheeling teenager is always frantically trying on the wild path of crime, bold and deviant, the most southern literary grotesque character in the work, and also embodies McCarthy's humor, this character is similar to Ballard in "Son of God", but obviously more witty than Ballard. Unlike Sutri, this criminal genius never considered living through legitimate labor, but insisted on going sideways, taking risks, and really making a small fortune. In the novel, he has always been known as a city rat, living in the dark corners of the city, picking up garbage, drilling holes, and even digging tunnels to the underground of bank vaults to carry out explosions, bringing shock and nightmares to city residents.
Sutri and Harrogate met in a labor camp and have been particularly fond of the child ever since, perhaps because Harrogate sees him as the only one to trust. He seemed to be repeating what his father had done to him, always trying to persuade Harrogate to get on the right path, but never intervened, including in preventing him from robbing the bank, perhaps because he had underestimated the other party's criminal capacity, and he quickly gave up when he saw that the persuasion was ineffective. Until the end, Sutri has not been able to save Harrogate's life, and at the end of the novel he is unsurprisingly imprisoned, and looking back at the whole story, the only successful rescue is when Harrogate is buried in the sewer by the ruins caused by the explosion, And sutri finds him dying and gives him a second chance.
03.
He didn't want to revive the South
It's about ending the South
The reasons for the failure to teach others to grow may be diverse, such as internal causes, you may feel that Sutri's own life is more absurd in the first place, and sometimes indecisive and irresponsible in personality, especially in the relationship between men and women, which is very immature and needs to grow further. But when this growth failure becomes common, we have to look for external causes. In McCarthy's creative vision, the American Southern society of the 1950s seemed to have a hard time finding redemption. The preface to the novel introduces the reader to the city of Knoxville, where ancient, dense rhetoric successfully outlines the historical objects of that era, a dirty, chaotic, and anachronistic place.
The bridge in Sutri, source Searching for Suttree
"The river is like being held in the holy grail called calm. The world beneath this bridge seems to have been born simple. Curious, that's all. (Sutri, p4)
Through Sutri's eyes, Knoxville is often cold and gloomy, and the lack of vitality of the urban space is mixed with many abnormal madmen and eccentric lunatics, the underground is full of caves, and the hollow structure seems to hint at the fragility of life here. Sutri fled to the edge of the city, but the situation did not get any better. In the narrative space of the novel, the Tennessee River occupies a central position, which is the most important water conservancy hub and geographical landscape in Tennessee. In literature, the river is usually portrayed as a source of nourishment for life, but the river in Sutri is extremely morbid, decaying and dark, full of garbage and filth, and more importantly, there are dead people, dead babies, and dead things in the river, making the river transform into a styx at the junction of life and death, metaphorically depicting the life of the inhabitants who are always lurking in death.
Death is an important theme in Sutri, and there are dead people everywhere in the story, but the people who are dying and dying are McCarthy's focus. As the book says, "The dead have transcended death." Death is what the living carry", he does not want to discuss the dead who have no memory, but to show the life full of death, such as Sutri has had many near-death experiences, and in many life scenes he looks like a living dead, and he even has a dead twin, that is, the twin brother who was "born to die". In shaping Sutri's image, McCarthy repeatedly used the dual body technique to reflect the blurred living conditions of life and death.
For example, in the first chapter, Sutri, who drank all night, saw the black shadow of himself in the glass door of the station on his way home, "His soul appeared on the other side of life... Sutri and Anti-Sutri". In the winter of hunger and cold, he saw "another Sutri" in the woods and blindly followed its guidance. This half-dead intermediate state does not end until the end of the novel, when Sutri, who has escaped from a serious illness, returns to the houseboat and sees a rotting male corpse lying on his bed, and decides to borrow the corpse to return the soul and become a man again. He bid farewell to Knoxville, where "the bones of friends and ancestors were imprisoned there", and embarked on a new journey of life with a stoic, romantic and independent spirit. In spite of the tragic tinges of his departure and the so lonelyness, sutri is still alive, and there is a glimmer of optimism, and you will feel a tragic heroism in him, because he has made some decisions and things to free himself from the social life of the lower class in Knoxville.
The book infuriated the residents of Knoxville for a time, but the decadent temperament here was not McCarthy's artistic imagination, and the city's material, political, historical, and social background in the 1950s was indeed terrifying. The American journalist John Gunther wrote in 1946: "Knoxville is the ugliest American city I have ever seen, and perhaps a little stronger than some of the factory towns in New England." Its main thoroughfare is called Guy Street, which seems to me to be an inappropriate name. (Note: Gay means joy in English). It's one of the most disorderly cities in the South, with the highest rate of homicide, pickpocketing, and theft in Tennessee. Bruce Wheeler wrote a chapter in the history of the city of Nou that is dedicated to the 1950s, pointing out that the city was completely behind the regional and national development trends at that time, and was obviously a city in deep trouble, mainly because it was designed and built before the development of automobile culture, where time seemed to stand still, completely out of touch with the rapidly developing outside world, and more importantly, because of the terrible pollution problems of the city, it was difficult to breathe.
Now located at the Lamar Mansion at 801-803 Guy Street, the hotel in the novel where Sutri and Joyce live together.
Source Searching for Suttree
The city's industry was not simply stagnant, but very outdated in the face of change, which was not unrelated to the conservative style of the city government, and the result was that Knoxville's unemployment rate rose from 5.8% in 1951 to a disturbing 9.7% in 1958, and people began to migrate to the emerging suburbs or northern industrial cities, and the permanent population plummeted. These social problems are perceived in Sutri. In addition to the large number of idle young people on the streets, McCarthy's urban spaces reveal the atmosphere of medieval bazaars, alluding to the pre-capitalist economic system, where old rural commerce prevailed, and where urban figures seemed to come entirely from another era.
Of course, Knoxville is only a microcosm of American Southern society, and since the Civil War, the American South has appeared to have insufficient economic development momentum and lack of cultural vitality, often satirizing it as a cultural desert. The Pre-World War I American South was more conservative and traditional than Victorian Britain, and the abolition of slavery did not essentially change the nature of racist and agrarian societies in the South, and although the United States flourished after the Civil War and World War I, becoming the number one power in the capitalist world, the society and economy of the South were isolated from development. At the same time, it retained much of the characteristics of medieval feudal society in Europe, even closer to medieval Europe than Europe, and the declining Calvinism in the north developed amazingly in the south, especially in the south. These factors have allowed conservatism to play a dominant role in the character of Southerners, who have an instinctive antipathy to modernization and capitalist industrial and commercial civilization. After the "First World War", capitalist modernization finally spread to the South, impacting the traditional values of the South and shocking a group of modernist writers, such as Lansom, Tate, Warren, Davidson, etc., who learned to imitate Elliott, Joyce and others, and created the prosperity of the Southern Renaissance. They share the anti-modernization stance of modernist literature, are bitter about the loss of tradition, dislike capitalist industrial and commercial society and modern industrial and commercial scientific and technological civilization, and their works are full of gloom and despair, showing human fragmentation and alienation in innovative expressive methods.
Because of their similarities in theme and style, McCarthy's early four works are often classified as Southern novels, collectively known as the "Southern Quartet", especially Sutri, which, while grand, does not look like it has been carefully laid out and tightly controlled, unfettered, clumsy, and full of vivid imagination, and often felt able to see Joyce's shadow. But mcCarthy set out to write the work in the '50s, the Southern Renaissance was drawing to a close, and when people witnessed writers who aspired to revitalize the South being snubbed, encouraged, and hated by their criticism of the South, forced to leave their homeland, their feelings for the South were mixed with more disappointment. Here in McCarthy, he had no intention of reviving the South, but of ending it, just as he later went to end the West.
"The Old Man Has Nothing to Rely On"
His Southern traditions are sudden death, violence, crime, fighting, and uncontrolled drinking. People can't wake up, awake is the feeling of poverty, pain, powerlessness, homelessness, only alcoholism can eliminate all practical problems, such as racial estrangement, and half-dead appearance, embracing death in hallucinations, out of chaos, what can such a South love and nostalgia? As Sutri bid farewell to Knoxville, McCarthy also said goodbye to the South in terms of creation, he moved to Arizona, Texas, and completed the landmark "Blood Meridian" on the western border, and also began the second stage of his literary career.
Finally, two reading suggestions. The first is to face up to fear, it is true that McCarthy's novels have a lot of frightening elements, but these are not gimmicks, on the one hand, the writer grew up in the South, familiar with the violence and decay there, fear just shows that the reader feels empathy for his words. On the other hand, I have always believed that Although McCarthy wrote about violence, he was always warm inside, and that the greater the horror he described, the heavier the pressure of sin and punishment, the more precious the courage to confront it, even at the cost of his life, and that these choices and actions to open the way should be regarded as the highlight of human nature. On the contrary, the current popular saying of the pendulum is not very honorable, the place can be rotten, but the local people still have to cheer up. At the same time, McCarthy's writing always exudes a desire for connection between people, suggesting that it is difficult for lonely people to grow. For nearly a decade he had been revising papers for scientists at the Santa Fe Institute, and their friendship had allowed him to find new breakthroughs in literary creation.
Second, some further reading can be done. Many of Sutry's characters were created based on those around him, such as Jim Lang, nicknamed "Jebel," who was Sutri's best friend, and was also based on McCarthy's best friend in Knoxville, who remained in touch after McCarthy moved. Lang died on September 14, 2019, and his name and address are true in the novel. There are plenty of scenes of city wandering through the book, and you can follow Sutri through the streets of Knoxville in the '50s, which now has a bar crawl called "Suttree Stagger," which refers to retracing the route of Sutri in the novel. Dr. Morgan of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville created a homepage called "Searching for Suttree," which describes and maps the main locations that appear in the book, which interested readers can search for and read more graphically, such as McCarthy's childhood home, surrounded by bamboo and honeysuckle, very hidden, and written in the novel as a refuge for homeless people.
The volume of this book is huge, the content continues the McCarthy encyclopedia writing, the language abandons a lot of modern English usage, and a large number of dialects are used, with distinct era and regional characteristics, although the translator has consulted a large number of materials, but still feel regrets. If there are any omissions and mistakes, please forgive and criticize and correct them.
Yang Yi, translator, Doctor of Literature, is a teacher in the English Department of Changzhou University
April 2022