THE MERRY MONTH OF MAY by James Jones

May is a green month, the emerald month, the month of spring growth, the month of becoming.  James Jones' novel, The Merry Month of May, is a timepiece set in the calendar events of May, 1968, a time of youthful exuberance and social change, with the politics of sex and violence played out against the student revolt in Paris, France during that tumultuous year.

It is a complicated novel, a novel of spiritual evolution, filled to the brim with lush literary and philosophical nuances that you might not grasp at first reading, unless you have also read Steven R. Carter's excellent study, James Jones: An American Literary Orientalist Master.   I discussed this a couple of months ago in a blog on the trinity in literature.

Last week novelist Bill Crider selected James Jones' A Touch of Danger for his Forgotten Book Friday review (link).  A fine review, but you should know that it too is structured in accord with James Jones' spiritual ideas of the transcendent.  The protagonist, Lobo, is a lone wolf, an animal man who, at age fifty, is struggling with his long-denied connections to the rest of humanity.

In the scene where Lobo meets the murderer, it is wolf meeting wolf, despite the civilized trappings which disguise them.  The clues are in the wording of the descriptions.

The first edition of A Touch of Danger provided a detailed map of the island on the frontispiece.  The epigraph is a quote of Achilles from Homer's Iliad, wishing that gall would vanish from men's minds.  Which is to say, ego.

Jones explained his philosophy to Carter.  He saw the spiritual evolution of man as going from animal man to mental man to spiritual man, with a diminishing of ego at each stage.  You can also think of this trinity as id-dominated, ego-dominated, and spiritually-dominated.  Or, as I detailed in an earlier blog, in numerous other ways.  These things are universals and can be seen in all of the author's many books including his justly famous war trilogy, From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line, and Whistle.

In his novels, Jones was more interested in the big issues, the human universals, than in the local politics of the day.  Frank McShane, in his excellent biography of Jones, says that he was rereading Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus during the writing of Whistle.  I suspect that Conrad's novel was also in part the inspiration for the narcissistic character of Samantha in The Merry Month of May.  It is clear that he was not a racist, yet he used her race as a symbol of the Other, as Conrad did originally.

I'd also like to recommend Kaylie Jones' Lies My Mother Never Told Me: A Memoir.  Long an accomplished author herself, in this book she discusses her memories of the literary figures which passed through her father's house.

Sunday's Smattering of Books Recently Read

The trinity in literature seems to be everywhere, a human universal inherited from the ancients.  We usually quote Emerson, as here, regarding this, and we delight in discovering such trinities as the furies in literary works, old and new.

Body, mind, and spirit.  Child, adult, and parent.  Id, ego, and superego.  A tool of interpretation with many variations, many parallels.

Peter Matthiessen, on page 41 of The Snow Leopard (Penguin Classics): "One "I" feels like an observer of this man who lies here in this sleeping bag in Asian mountains; another "I" is thinking about Alex; a third is the tired man who tries to sleep." Matthiessen tells the same tale three ways in his Pulitzer-winning Shadow Country (Modern Library Paperbacks), divided into three parts but all are one.


Robert Penn Warren showed the three "I" viewpoints in different ways in his greatest novel All the King's Men, as in this passage:

"It was like the second when you come late at night and see the yellow envelope of the telegram sticking out from under your door and you can lean and pick it up, but don't open it yet, not for a second. While you stand there in the hall, with the envelope in your hand, you feel there's an eye on you, a great big eye looking straight at you from miles and dark and through walls and houses and through your coat and vest and hide and sees you huddle up way inside, in the dark which is you, inside yourself, like a clammy, sad little foetus you carry around inside yourself. The eye knows what's in the envelope, and it is watching you to see you when you open it and know, too. But the clammy, sad little foetus which is you way down in the dark which is you too lifts up its sad little face and its eyes are blind, and it shivers cold inside you for it doesn't want to know what is in that envelope. It wants to lie in the dark and not know, and be warm in its not-knowing."

"The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him for another time. There's the cold in your stomach, but you open the envelope, you have to open the envelope, for the end of man is to know."

When we read a novel and identify with the protagonist and feel the emotions of the novel, we do so with one "I."  When we observe the protagonist, reflecting on the novel, interpreting its meaning, we do so with a different "I."
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The Lust for Blood: Why We Are Fascinated by Death, Murder, Horror, and Violence by Jeffrey A. Kottler (2011), 310 pages, including notes, bibliography, and index.


Jeffrey A. Kottler, PHD, "is a practicing psychologist, professor of counseling at California State University, Fullerton, and the author of more than seventy-five books, including the New York Times bestseller, The Last Victim: A True-Life Journey into the Mind of the Serial Killer."


Too often less of an argument than a survey of the way our culture is entertained by violence, The Lust For Blood is good but for my taste a bit too windy and too circumspect (as if to go easy on the pop, soundbite audience) to forcefully answer the question that the subtitle poses.  Dr. Kottler concludes:


"It is indeed the fear of death, the need for stimulation, and instinctual aggression that are at the core of our fascination with violence. There may come a day when human beings no longer require such stimulation in excise of our demons and purge ourselves of hostility. In the meantime, we live in the prisons of our own making, defined by our personal codes of honor and morality, as well as the choices we make for how we entertain ourselves."


I like what he says, but of course the need for stimulation and escape is also caused by repression, the denial of death.


Such entertainments as Reservoir Dogs and The Wild Bunch are briefly discussed. When, in the sub-chapter discussing these two, Cormac McCarthy gets mentioned, it is not Blood Meridian that gets quoted, but instead The Road.  And Dr. Kottler too separates the "I" of the observer from the "I" of the vicarious protagonist:

"Sam Peckinpah, who laid the groundwork for the violence in cinema of his generation, heartily agrees with Tarantino. In his films Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs, the public outcry only fed greater interest. Audiences appeared to clamor for the privilege of paying money to be horrified. Peckinpah claimed his films were actually antiviolent since they portray human behavior at its most base, primitive, and awful. 'And yet there's a certain response that you get from it, an excitement, because we're all violent people, we have violence within us."


"As previously mentioned, there is also a control element to the experience of viewing such films. You have the power at almost any moment to moderate the level of arousal you are feeling. If you become too terrified by what is happening on the screen, you always have the option to remind yourself that it is only a movie. Look at your watch. Close your eyes. Sneak a peek at your phone. Stretch. Reorient yourself. It's not real. It's not happening to me."


"If, on the other hand, you are feeling bored and disengaged from the film and want to ratchet up the excitement, then you can pretend that it is real. Jump in with both feet. Imagine that it's you who is running, hiding, or fighting. What would you do in this predicament?"


"This happened to me recently while attending a horrifying and disturbing movie about the end of the world as we know it. I think at one point I started to shut down because I was so freaked out. I kept looking at my watch and yawning. I started thinking about the set design and the camera angles, admiring the acting, wondering about how the special effects were designed. I was in perfect control--or so I thought at the time."


"But with an hour left to go, feeling restless and bored, I thought, What the hell, and slipped back into the narrative without my seatbelt attached. The film became so real for me that when the lights came back on, I was still there. I couldn't stop crying and couldn't even explain to my son why I was so upset."


"The film was The Road , based on Cormac McCarthy's story about a father's legacy to his son in a post apocalyptic world. I couldn't stop thinking about what I would do in such circumstances, what I would do to survive and protect my own family against marauding killers. And I couldn't stop crying because, for me, even a week later, the movie hadn't yet ended; I was still living it."


"Did I get my money's worth from an entertainment experience that still haunts me and invades my dreams and fantasies? You betcha. But I also lost control and I'm still paying for it."

_________

Lately I've been preoccupied with Stephen Greenleaf novels.  I began back at his first novel, Grave Error, and studied all of his novels straight through again.  I read them mostly with my observer eye this time, noting the nuances, the language, the little things, and recalling my first experiences of immersing myself into these novels, one by one, gladly forking over hardcover prices as soon as they appeared.  Greenleaf was a stylist too, with a wonderful sense of humor.


Stephen Greenleaf said (in the interview at this link) that his first novel was as much like those of Ross MacDonald as he could get it ("I'm surprised he didn't sue me.").  His narrator was mostly impersonal consciousness making its way into the case at hand, with no ego to get in the way of observing others.  As the novels progress, Greenleaf's protagonist/first-person narrator develops more and more of his own identity and personal motivations.  The great attraction of these novels (for me, at least) was his civilized voice.  Unlike so many private eyes, he wasn't a self-interested capitalist, nor a macho tough guy, nor a Sherlockian puzzle solver.  He was a seeker, a blue-collar social critic, reflective, introspective, and humble.

A lawyer himself, Greenleaf mostly made fun of lawyers in these books.  Tanner points out an occasional exception, including an old friend he goes to see in Past Tense.  The lawyer's office had been totally redecorated since the last time Tanner was there, with everything now in the western motif.  Tanner asks his friend, why the change?

"Cormac McCarthy," his friend says.  Tanner says that his friend acted surprised that he even knew who McCarthy was.

I had to laugh out loud when I first read that passage, back when Past Tense came out in 1998.  That same year McCarthy came out with Cities of the Plain.  McCarthy had won the National Book Award but was still a relatively unknown recluse back then--except to a core of loyal readers.  I remember going online to the Cormac McCarthy Society Forum and posting that excerpt there.

Stephen Greenleaf's books were always a special treat for this reader.  Highly intelligent and written in a sparkling style, they were always well reviewed as such.  But they didn't sell well.  Greenleaf tried different things and different publishers, but finally after  sixteen novels (fourteen Tanner novels and two stand alones), Greenleaf reluctantly quit writing and went back to lawyering.  He still doesn't even have his own wikipedia page.

Forgotten?  Not by his core of loyal readers, and good gosh, we miss him.  In his last novel, Ellipsis, he said goodbye to his readers with a satire on the publishing industry--before his own ellipsis.  This novel is written with his usual humor and asides and it also includes some special little things that you have to read very closely to catch.  I think I'll devote a Friday's Forgotten Book blog to it soon.

JAWS and MADAME BOVARY and ZEN: Thursday's Critical Anaylsis

You can see John P. Anderson's excellent Flaubert's Madame Bovary: The Zen Novel at google books, at this link.


Anderson gives the classic a wonderful Zen interpretation.  Gustave Flaubert drew from several influences when writing his great novel, including Flaubert's own family and the historical Delphine Delamare, the real Madame Bovary.


Flaubert invented new literary techniques to subvert reader expectations in order to bring them to a new awareness, not just of literature, but of their own daily lives as well.  One way he does this is through the counterpoint of style and plot.  "The style of the novel is grounded in Zen-like detachment and freedom whereas the plot is mired in desire, illusion, and determinism."


"Flaubert finds a principal enemy of human freedom [free will] deep in the guts of mankind in the tapeworm of desire.  The desire tapeworm feeds on freedom and excretes dissatisfaction.  Emma (Madame Bovary) is not free because she has the worm.  Emma wants, Emma gets, but she is quickly dissatisfied and then the worm wants more.  Emma could be a poster girl for our 21st century credit card society."


For a definition of Zen, Anderson uses the one in the Encyclopedia Britannica:

"...the Buddha-nature, or potential to achieve enlightenment, is inherent in everyone, but lies dormant because of ignorance.  It is best awakened not by the study of scripture, the practice of good deeds, rites and ceremonies, or worship of images but by a sudden breaking through of the boundaries of common, everyday thought."


This sparkling study is nearly line-by-line and is 229 pages long, full of insights and wisdom.  Many authors and philosophers are cited, but in particular Anderson uses Schopenhauer's The World As Will And Idea and Parerga And Paralipomena: A Collection of Philosophical Essays.


Anderson says that the first chapter of Madame Bovary is about the establishment of the self.  The change in the narrators, between Charles and an anonymous "we" and an anonymous "I" leads to the detached observer with a Zen perspective.  The observer is free, while Madame Bovary is a slave to mindless desire:  "Me me me.  More more more. Shop shop shop.  These are the call signs for Emma Bovary."

So what do JAWS and MADAME BOVARY have in common?


A lot.  The insatiable will to consume especially.  Dean Sluyter, in a marvelous essay entitled "All You Can Eat," draws a fine Zen interpretation from Jaws. 


As with Flaubert's novel, the movie of Peter Benchley's Jaws opens with the point of view of the shark, "the shark-as-self" established with an underwater camera, nosing through the seaweed as if looking for prey with that dualism of its driving music in the background.  The collective "we" of the audience looks through the shark's eyes, traveling through the ocean.  Consume, consume, consume.


The shark is the great white, the great blank, the great nothingness.  It is an emblem of what the Buddhist's call "the hungry ghost," the all consuming desire.

Sluyter says, the first victim is the long-haired girl who runs off from the beach party to skinny-dip at sunset, a naked Eve calling to her impassive passed-out Adam to join her.  "Shown in a long shot, she swims tranquilly in the twilit water, which glows with a jewel-like radiance and fills the screen with its vast expanse, a tiny figure easily at one with the ocean of wholeness."  As in Tim Winton's Breath: A Novel and all the other such transcendental works I review here, the ocean is a symbol of the collective Oversoul in this interpretation. 

Then the shark approaches and we see her from below, from the shark's point of view.

In the movie, the forces of material consumption live in denial.  They want to cover up the truth with illusions and salesmanship.  The three men who resist the denial and set out to hunt the shark represent a trinity, and the way Sluyter uses it is consistent with the way it is used by Emerson, Melville, McCarthy, Conrad, and so many others frequently discussed in this blog.

Sluyter says that the shark is the main character, that Hooper, Brady and Captain Quint "are supporting characters who exemplify three different ways to confront the hungry self."  Sluyter says that the three approaches are what Buddhists could call the fundamentalist, the Hinayana, and the Mahayana.  These approaches yield three different outcomes.

1.  Quint has the fundamentalist, eye-for-an-eye approach.  "It is the way of an aggression rooted in dualism."  You might say that Quint is  a basic man dominated by his animal-nature.  He is the body in the body/mind/spirit trinity.

Quint's fundamentalism is driven by a perpetual struggle against any adversary conceived as Other than the one who struggles.  This is reflected in everything he does, the song he chooses to sing, the destruction of the radio, in everything he says.  His consuming hatred of the shark becomes self-consummation. 

2.  Sluyter says that monkish Brady represents the Theravada/Hinayana branch of Buddhism, the "smaller vehicle" as befits the small cage in which he descends in an effort to kill the shark.  If Quint is the body in the body/mind/spirit analogy, Brady represents the mind, the scholar, the shark expert always seeking more knowledge, a better understanding.  It is Brady who, after confronting the shark face-to-face, declares, "You're gonna need a bigger boat."

3.  Sluyter says that Hooper represents the Mahayana or "greater vehicle" of Buddhism.  Hooper contains metaphorically the spiritual force of our common humanity that finally blows away the shark, the nothingness blown to nothingness.  The last scene shows Hooper and Brady paddling together on two of the buoys lashed together.  Hooper, representative of the spirit, says that he believes that the tide is with them.  Brady, representative of the mind, tells him to keep paddling.

Mind, body, spirit.  You should read Dean Sluyter's entire essay, which runs a long twenty pages and is collected in Cinema Nirvana: Enlightenment Lessons from the Movies.

Thursday's Critical Analysis: Ross MacDonald's THE THREE ROADS

Ross Macdonald's  The Three Roads (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard), one of his early novels which had been long out of print, has recently being reissued along with several of his other more arcane works.  The first edition hardcover dustjacket, pictured above, had an interesting Dali aspect to it, more in keeping with the consciousness of the novel than the sleazy sexual cover on the first paperback edition, pictured below.

The 1991 Bantam paperback edition had a much better cover: the lipstick on the suggestive cigarette smoking on the heart ashtray.

The title of The Three Roads is taken from Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, and Macdonald overtly uses both the play and the Freudian interpretation of the myth in the novel, much more explicitly here than in his other novels.  The title also suggests a metaphoric interpretation involving a trinity, and Macdonald gives us one in the text when a character waits in a new train station across from the old one:

"It seemed to her that the two buildings were symbols of historic forces.  On the one hand was the giant mass of the power and utility companies that actually dominated the life of the state; on the other, the Spanish past that California plutocracy used to stucco its facade.'

"The shining metal streamliner waiting beside the station added the final touch to the allegory.  It was the impossible future superimposed upon the ugly present in the presence of the regretted past.  There was no continuity between the tenses, she thought.  You passed from one to the other as a ghost passed through a wall, at the risk of your own reality."

Past, present, and future.  Superego, ego, and id.  The father, the son, and the holy ghost.

Mcdonald's protagonist has lost his past through amnesia.  Like Oedipus in the myth, he has to piece together the mystery of the past piece by piece, not knowing whether it is best to know or not know, but compelled to do it in any case as if through fate.  One of the doctors states the case as, "Past and present are so intertwined that you can't abandon the one without losing your grip on the other.  Loss of the present is a fair definition of insanity."

As with the myth, the solving of the mystery of the past leads to unseen consequences and ironic implications.  The book ends with the protagonist guilty but wiser, finally understanding that what he needs is not justice, but mercy.

A large amount of critical literature has naturally grown up around Ross Macdonald's works.  Jerry Speir's Ross Macdonald is a good one, especially for its detailing of the Freudian influence.  Robert L. Gale's A Ross Macdonald Companion,  and Peter Wolfe's Dreamers Who Live Their Dreams: The World of Ross Macdonald's Novels are both excellent reads


An excellent tandem read to Macdonald's The Three Roads is Salley Vickers' Where Three Roads Meet: The Myth of Oedipus, a thoughtful and novelistic rendering.

Off And Running Monday: The Role of Sex in the Trinity

Body, mind, and spirit.

The father, the son, and the holy ghost.

All are one.

Mystery novelist and religious author Dorothy L. Sayers, writing of the trinity as a literary device in The Mind of the Maker, said that some books are mind or spirit dominated and neglect the body, while others are body or spirit dominated and neglect the mind.  She shows how "some books are Father-dominated, some Son-dominated, and some Spirit-dominated."  She calls for a balance in fiction between body, mind, and spirit--and as she further unpacks the concept, "as Idea, Energy, and Power."

In life as in art, we should not neglect one part of the trinity for another.  Living the life of the mind, we should not neglect the body.  The body contains the sensuous and the sexual, and unfortunately, the sexual too often becomes dominant, neglecting the mind and spirit.  Camile Paglia, in her mammoth study, Sexual Personae (1990), argued that "Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges."

In this work, Paglia argues in favor of the Marquis de Sade and says that Freud's Oedipal Theory dominates our sexuality and our lives.  Her arguments are worth reading, but the book consists mostly of interesting inferences drawn from false premises.  Sexual desires are indeed repressed (more so in puritanical times than in the United States today), but by far the most significant thing that is repressed is our knowledge and fear of nothingness and our own inevitable personal deaths.

Paglia is well versed in Freud's writings, but she writes like she hasn't considered nor even read the writings of those brilliant psychologists who came later such as Eric Fromm, Otto Rank, and, most importantly, Ernest Becker, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his brilliant study, The Denial of Death.

Yet the body is the temple of being, and sex is a part of life.  Buddhist David Guy, author of Autobiography of my Body (pictured above), tries to sort out the role of sex versus spirituality in The Red Thread of Passion: Spirituality and the Paradox of Sex.  Wendell Berry, in Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays, like Dorothy Sayers, argues for a balance.

Wendell Berry says, "The breath of God is only one of the divine gifts that make us living souls; the other is the dust.  Most of our modern troubles come from our misunderstanding and misvaluation of this dust....This madness constitutes the norm of humanity and of modern Christianity."

The problem of unbalance exists at all levels, personal relationships, community, society, ecology.  To mistreat the body for the sake of the soul "is not just to burn one's house for the sake of the insurance," nor is it just self-hatred of the most deep and dangerous sort.  The problem is that we so often value the material over the spiritual and the life of the mind over the life of the body.  What we need is balance.

THURSDAY'S CRITICAL ANALYSIS: TIM WINTON'S BREATH, A TRANSCENDENTAL INTERPRETATION

Part coming-of-age tale, part surfing novel, part secular-buddhist parable, Tim Winton's BREATH is a short but deep masterpiece much larger than its sum of parts.

The novel opens with a grown and mature Pike in an emergency vehicle, on a mission to help others.  We see him as mature, but he also says that he's addicted to the adrenaline rush, that he needs it in order to feel alive.  This first short chapter is like a prologue, and after that he narrates the story of his youth.  From the dustjacket flap:

"On the wild, lonely coast of Western Australia, two thrill-seeking boys fall into the thrall of Sando, a veteran big-wave surfer.  Together they form an odd but elite trio.  The grown man initiates the boys into a Spartan regimen of risk and challenge in which they test themselves to storm swells on remote and shark-infested reefs, pushing one another to the edge of courage, endurance, and sanity."

In the metaphor of religion and myth, man was formed from God's holy breath, breathed into the dust.  The breath is still a part of many Eastern traditions, a focal point of concentration during meditation.  In many creation myths, man was born of the sea.  The beautiful dustjacket on the first edition of Tim Winton's  Breath: A Novel speaks of the sea, but also of the foam, the air bubbles trapped in it.  

It is a good picture for a metaphor, and the one I ascribe to it is Ralph Waldo Emerson's: The rivers, ponds, and oceans of the earth are one, and it is the sea of life, the oversoul. We are like drops of ocean spray that are flung up on the beach, then we separate and develop individual egos so that we do not recognize each other or our common spirit, our common humanity.

By this reckoning, individual spirits are alien on these shores (the material world) and are filled with a longing to be reunited with the oversoul (sometimes taking the form of a death wish). We are spiritual beings having a physical experience.

Winton gives us many descriptions of the “churning white foam and wind-hurled spray” upon the beach, too many for me not to take note. The Great White in the novel is also the Great Blank, the nothingness of illusion.  And Tim Winton's male trinity of surfers in the novel consists of: 

1. Sando is Sanderson, the spirit guru to the other two, living on the edge, on the sand between ocean and shore.

2.  Pike is the middle man, caught between animal man and spiritual man.  He is called Pikelet at first when he is nothing more than a little fish, just learning to live in our common waters. In the first chapter we see him grown and compassionate, and at the end of the novel, he states as much, that his life now is about saving lives and being kind. Pikelet transforms into Pike at that moment when he learns compassion, when he learns to forgive.  In this parable, that same moment is the death of his father and the birth of his son.

3.  Loonie is a loon--crazy, yes, but also an aquatic bird who floats on the water, who dives in the water, but who has not learned to live in the water.

Eva Sanderson is the physically-dominated counterpart of her husband, Sando, who is the spiritually-dominated surfer guru.  Both live on the edge, pushing the envelope--Sando through his surfing exploits and travel, Eva through her sexual affairs.  Eva is Pikelet’s personal Eve, in accord with both Freudian and secular buddhist thought, and as symbolic of the evolutionary fall of consciousness into animal man--for which the Garden of Eden myth is itself a parable.

In this interpretation, what these four main characters face is the emptiness of self, and their flight from their empty selves results in addictions, to alcohol and drugs, to endorphin rushes and personal dangers, to new sexual conquests.  To Buddhists this emptiness is maya, the illusion of ego.

Enveloped in ego, we seek constant escape from the emptiness, or we become addicted to money and stuff, always wanting more, always wanting the new.  No matter what heights we attain, these soon become dull and, left with our empty selves, we then seek more. Buddhists call this the hungry ghost, for it is a bottomless void, and when we try to fill it, as with the consumption of more stuff, the laugh is on us. I always think of Mark Twain’s blue jays trying to fill up a house with acorns, but other apt literary metaphors abound.

The novel moves to where the narrator, Pike, is an older, wiser man, almost 50, looking back.  He has learned to control his addictions.  He has forgiven Eva and no longer blames her. And he has forgiven his older self.  People are fools, he says, not monsters.

Transcendental Tuesday: More Trinity in Literature Interpretations

Last week on Transcendental Tuesday, link, I posted about the Trinity, quoting Emerson and others about this human universal in myth, religion, and literature.  On Thursday,  link, I posted about the dark side of the trinity as it symbolically appears in literature as the furies, as exemplified in novels by Joseph Conrad, Austin Wright, and Cormac McCarthy.



William C. Spencer wrote about the dark trinity of Outer Dark in his essay, "Cormac McCarthy's Unholy Trinity: Biblical Parody in Outer Dark," published in the anthology Sacred Violence: Cormac McCarthy's Appalachian Works edited by Wade Hall and Rick Wallach.  Spencer wrote, "Just as Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown encounters a diabolical figure in the dark forest who remarkably resembles himself, Culla encounters the three hellhounds that embody his own inner darkness."

The dark trinity of repressed human animal nature shadows Culla in the novel in italics until the end, the repressed inner darkness then coming into the outer darkness.  They are the murderers as well as the leaders of the lynch mob in search of the murderers.


The first three McCarthy novels, The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, and Child of God, on the larger scale, are about the evolutionary fall of consciousness into animal man, bringing with it the knowledge of death and the subjective moral sense of good and evil.

Before the Fall, the alpha animal man procreated with every available female--mothers, sisters, and daughters included--and fended off all comers like the farmer in Child Of God.  The incest in Outer Dark goes back to that, as natural as that between the sons and daughters of Old Testament Adam and Eve.  The eclipse in Outer Dark symbolizes the Oedipal fear that the son will eclipse the father.

That McCarthy also ingeniusly incorporated his own history into Outer Dark is eloquently argued in Jay Ellis's book, No Place for Home: Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy (Studies in Major Literary Authors).  There are many other different and excellent interpretations of this as well.


William C. Spencer, the McCarthy scholar mentioned above, is also the man who first talked about McCarthy's novel, Suttree, as being an incarnation of the life of the buddha:  Suttree, born into a wealthy and influential family, renounces his privledges and goes to live among the downtrodden where, bodhisattva-like, he takes on the sufferings of other sentient beings.  The italicized prologue suggests that "no soul shall walk save you," and Suttree later says that "It is not only in death that all souls are one."  Spencer argued that Suttree transcends at the end of the novel, after overcoming his fear of death.


They say it is an eloquent paper, but no hard copy of it is to be found either at the Cormac McCarthy Society or on the internet.  William C. Spencer, then an English professor at Delta University, cannot now be found, it seems.  Perhaps someone who knows him will see this and let us know.


John Cant, author of Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism (Studies in Major Literary Authors), gives a Christian interpretation of Suttree.  But he also sees the Eternal Feminine in the novel in the form of the trinity, Wanda, Joyce, and Mother She.  Cant says:


"The Great Mother was typically represented in three manifestations, nymph, matron, and crone.  Suttree encounters all three; Wanda is the numph, Joyce the matron, and Mother She the crone.  The latter is the Queen of the Underworld; the Goddess presides over both life and death, each passing into the other continuously.  It was the loss of this epistemology that brought to man the need for 'resurrection,' the conquest of death."

The use of the Trinity is, of course, widespread in literature.  This last sunday, I reviewed the newly published book of interviews with Tom Robbins who discusses his novel, Another Roadside Attraction, published over twenty years ago.  Robbins says that his character Amanda is "a manifestation of the triple aspects of the universal goddess--maiden, slut, and mother/wife--as connected to the earth as any mushroom."




Animal man, middle man, spiritual man.  McCarthy may have wanted to style his body of work as a trilogy containing other trilogies.  His first three novels were an animal man trilogy, as Denis Donoghue has pointed out in his book, The Practice of Reading.  Suttree is a stand-alone novel, autobiographical and both historical and literary.  Blood Meridian starts with "See the child." and ends with the kid being transformed into a man after giving compassion to the imaginary crone in the desert, and then transformed again by death via the materialist Judge.

The western trilogy is about the middle man, and at the end of the trilogy McCarthy turns to spiritual man.  The greater trilogy of his entire work is thus far animal man, middle man, spiritual man, and although certainly not a perfect fit, it resembles the general arc of the work of James Joyce, and before that, of Dante.


McCarthy's writing style has changed with each phase, the animal man phase being a jungle of words in a Faulkner-like style, the heroic western trilogy leaning to the Heminwayesque, and the spiritual phase leaning to Samuel Beckett's minimalist style.


Trilogies within trilogies, arcs within arcs.

Off And Running Monday: Maintaining Balance In Life

A balanced life: Body, Mind, and Spirit.

I believe in that trinity as a model.  It goes along with other things I believe in, such as secular transcendentalism and a modified literary naturalism, in the Jack London sense, as opposed to idealism.  Our bodies are animal, a part of the material world, and we should not forget it.

The body is the temple in which the mind and spirit of the individual reside, just as on a larger scale, the garden of the earth is the body/temple in which mankind resides, in a Wendell Berry agrarian sense.  We are,  or we should be, the caretakers of that body, that wild garden.  So I run, not to win races nor to set personal records nor to collect trophies, but simply, deliberately, and with a sense of responsibility, to take care of this body as long as possible.  There are also the benefits to the mind and to the spirit, for all are one.

George Sheehan wrote, "There are as many reasons for running as there are days in a year, years in my life."

Unfortunately, not all reasons are good, as running can become addictive, no longer deliberate but compulsive.  Some runners become addicted to the endorphon rush experience, some become addicted to the competition and the glory of winning, an ego thing making them prone to knee injuries.  Some runners run only for fun, socially, the rear echelon of any popular road race becoming something of a moving lawn party.

Some eastern American Indian nations employed runners to carry messages between villages.  My wife and I got a feel for this wilderness trail running in the Hocking Hills Indian Run, which we attended in Ohio years ago.  You don't run it in packs, but with an individually staggered start.  The trail winds its way up hill and down,  through beautiful fall woods and beside quiet waters.  The trail is wide enough to pass and be passed, but there is the opportunity to run entirely on your own.

The movie adaptation of Walter Edmonds' classic, Drums Along the Mohawk, has scout Henry Fonda run fourteen miles to the next fort.  The Indians send a triune of Indians to run him down, a sprinter, a middle distance man, and a stayer.  This is handled differently in the book itself, where the scout is chased by 40 Mohawks.  The movie version is not only more realistic, it makes for a better running story.

Running for your life is also an element in Samuel Fuller's little known western movie,  Run of the Arrow, starring Rod Steiger, Brian Keith, and Charles Bronson.  An arrow is shot, and Steiger and Keith are given a head start, the Indians not taking pursuit until the mountain men have passed the arrow.  The movie was a 1957 precursor of Dancing With Wolves.

Benjamin Cheever, son of the famous novelist and a fine author himself, details the history of running in cinema along with many other things in his memoir, Strides: Running Through History With an Unlikely Athlete.  Recently I read Cheever's contribution to the anthology entitled The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them.  His choice was  The Denial of Death by Pulitzer Prize winning psychologist and author, Ernest Becker, a book that helps to explain, among many other things, why some runners might compulsively take their running to extremes.

The trick is to find balance in the trinity.