Outer Dark
A novel by Cormac McCarthy
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East of the Evening Redness: Reading backwards from ‘Blood Meridian’
Introducing oneself to Cormac McCarthy through his 1985 novel Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West is a rewarding, if challenging, way to get acquainted with the talents and virtues of this deeply literary author, with one caveat: upon finishing, it rather feels like there’s nowhere to go but down. Not only is Meridian often hailed as his magnum opus or ‘Great American novel’, but it feels all too optimistic to imagine such extreme heights of sublimity being captured twice by one author . . .
As I read backwards from Meridian through the early stages of his bibliography, I’ll be hoping to overturn this gut feeling as I highlight his less often read works. Inevitably, this will be a tremendously unfair exercise; no book deserves to be compared with, or even read after, Meridian. But there is one advantage: it puts just as much focus on what McCarthy’s earlier novels do that Meridian doesn’t, as the inverse. In reading backwards through time, I’ll be looking at what each of these novels, each of which boasts a striking blurb of its own, uniquely brings to the table.
Outer Dark showcases Cormac McCarthy’s distinct prose at its most dreamlike, the very atmosphere seething and stirring slowly as its characters trance through the woodlands of Appalachia. Unlike Suttree or Child of God, where McCarthy only leads us to doubt the accuracy and integrity of narrators and focalisers, Outer Dark forces its reader to question the very reality of what they are reading. Not that McCarthy’s novel is unrealistic—there is neither a sense that any part of the novel could not happen, nor that it is poorly written or nonsensical for all its stylistic choices—but it is fantastically unreal nonetheless, all the way from its opening amid oneiric prophecy to its parabolic ending.
(Fitting, then, for a novel whose title originates from three Biblical parables to be one in which the very lines between literality and metaphor are blurred; the Bible, after all, for all its many contradictions, is debated between sects as a literal or allegorical text.)
Outer Dark follows separately two siblings, Rinthy and Culla Holme, as they make their solitary way through the country—the former in search of their newborn bastard child after it is stolen away by Culla and left for dead; Culla himself pursuing Rinthy, employment, and a vague notion of redemption. Yet, awaking at the start of the novel from a dream of eclipses, evasive prophets and angry crowds, Culla’s motives are more akin to those of a man fleeing than a man seeking anything.
Shame follows Culla everywhere: first in bringing a child of incest into the world, and second by having abandoned it in spite of its own innocence in that crime which is his and Rinthy’s alone. But mother Rinthy, professedly unashamed, understands the consequences of her actions far better than he: it “belongs to me,” she says often of her child, as if it is a part of her very self, like a kernel of her own sin extant and tangible. She is driven by far more than the natural bond between mother and child: hers is a fundamental need for reconciliation with the self, something she can never attain in the home she shares with her brother.
Redemption through the escape or redemption through self-acceptance—which of these methods will triumph? Can either idea find vindication in a place as dark and hostile and impenetrable as McCarthy’s Appalachia? At times it seems doubtful. What begins as an earnest journey for both Rinthy and Culla soon devolves into a narrative loop, a recrudescent hell in which characters walk far but seem to travel nowhere; in which they pursue but get no closure to their quarries; in which the world acts against them time and time again, always in the same or similar ways, stifling any hopes of the changes they seek.
This is a novel to disorient its readers just as the ‘outer dark’ of Appalachia is a place to disorient the two siblings. Everywhere they go, it seems, are woods and huts largely indistinct from each other. What little clues to their propinquity are given to us are buried deep in what seems (to them) to be meaningless talk of strangers. Tension is built between the lines, not through traditional story beats—in the latter’s absence, the narrative captures a hellishly mundane repetitiveness for its characters, ordeals that are not to be overcome or escaped but which return to haunt them like atavisms.
Among their adversaries are a disquieting, murderous ‘triune’—a philosophising, bearded stranger, a nameless man, and a mute. They stalk the region, enacting a violence whose nature is neither entirely that of vigilante justice nor senseless murder. Guilty, innocent — neither are safe from this band. Yet they seem from the start to have purpose beyond a narrative one, even if it is so obscure that the characters might never discern it.
Though in general the novel reflects the Theban/Oedipal plays more than any other Greek myth, the triune are like Aeschylus’s Furies (prior to being transformed into the Eumenides, the deliverers of Athenian-democratic justice) who hound the matricidal Orestes across Greece. Like the Furies, McCarthy’s triune embodies archaic notions of revenge; they home in on the two siblings and their child of sin, slowly but surely, bearing and leaving in their wake a pervasion of justice and reason that must once have made sense to past peoples of the world, but no more. It is as if they have been ripped straight from that ancient history to the modern page; more than any other part of the novel does the triune embody that ambiguity between real and unreal.
Yet as Rinthy, Culla, and the triune journey across the land, the point is not to dissect the literal from the allegorical, but to take them as two sides of the same coin: the surface narrative cannot flourish without the symbol imbued within, but nor is the novel a flat parable that fails to stir us into caring for its characters. McCarthy “has made the fabulous real, the ordinary mysterious,” wrote Thomas Lask in the first review of Outer Dark. But the key here is not an inversion of the fantastic and the real, a replacement of each by the other, but unity of the two.
Outer Dark is perhaps the most similar to Meridian in that regard: in both is there merit to reading the action in ways that are less than literal. But while Meridian has gathered since its release a plethora of alternate readings—in some of which literality is challenged to the degree that prominent characters are considered mere metaphors or aspects of psyche—these readings remain indefinite, speculative. The nature of their being alternative readings has kept them distinct: although it is limiting to do so in my opinion, it is possible to ignore or disregard certain plausible (and textually evidenced) theories about the book. In Outer Dark, on the other hand, the literal and parabolic readings are inseparable; the whole of it must be considered as one. So while the story seems at once to be a journey, a dream, a prophecy and a parable, it is no weaker in any one of those aspects for all their numerousness.
Also east of the Evening Redness—more in this series:
- Suttree
- Child of God
- Outer Dark (this article)
- The Orchard Keeper (pending)
