. Spinning .

There’s much going through my head this morning about characters within a story and I’ll be posting more on it later, but I wanted to get the base down now–before I go write up sales slips and plant geraniums.

We are free as readers to form opinions of story characters, and are just as free to verbalize them without threat of slander.  Now we form opinions of real people as well, but it hopefully takes longer, and is done with a touch of polite conservative open-mindedness.  In building a character, a writer strives to make his protagonist real and likable–whether a good guy or a bad guy.  There is no doubt that Dorothy Parker’s characters are relative–even when they are from a now bygone era (as read in the present), and the relationships between protagonist and antagonist is where Parker shines as a writer.  We also see Parker’s personal opinions of them, and especially in a marital plot, as she blesses them with the worst traits and common pitfalls of man/woman interplay.

Cormac McCarthy’s characters are tougher to figure out.  We see many sides of them as he gradually puts them into a scenario and we must watch carefully to see how they react.  We’re unsure of Cornelius Suttree.  I like him; I see some good things in him as he helps his friends.  But there’s always the question:  Why did he desert his family, his wife and child, and why is there such hatred towards him from some of them?  Is it justified? 

By the time McCarthy brings in the death of Suttree’s young son, whom we didn’t know about until we hear the news, we are torn between his abandonment and the vicious reaction of his inlaws and the town when he goes for the funeral.  Much more than the normal reaction of divorce.  What did he do?  How big a bad-ass was he?

So we reserve judgement, and follow him more carefully, cautiously back home.  We watch, wait, and become totally involved in his life.

Dorothy Parker’s characters are real to me, perhaps because of the era, perhaps because, though this was not as my family lived, it was something I had watched in nightly movies on Channel 5′s The Early show.

McCarthy’s characters are real because of how they live; McCarthy building the character into his more vivid descriptions of their environment.  Again, this is not as I have ever lived, but Suttree indeed pulses with a life that is disturbing.  This must be, for me, its appeal.  The man, the place, the deeds done that mama warned about.  There’s hopelessness, yet one thin fishing line that will not break, and the patience of the fisherman to fight against the slapping sea and flapping fish to reel in something that would make the battle worth the while.

Okay, so who here knows what’s going on?  Really?  Don’t lie or try to slip one by me in a rowboat while I’m trying not to tip my own canoe.  Because I’ll know, you see, I’ll know.  I’ll see through the fancy twirling ribbon sentences and hear the unvoiced struggling stammers since most likely you, like me, don’t have an ort of understanding nor the map.

I wonder if Suttree, and McCarthy himself are just like one of us, the words not borne of deep-kilned knowledge but instead, of wondering wandering paths of silvered snail trails and the anguish of the needed turning back.  Eloquence not only sticking in the picking up of clues, but in the useless striving for the words.  Words that can be tossed and tumbled in the mind until they come out fresh and clean like laundry from a dryer.  Still hot.  Cooling slowly.  Wearable.

But words are only words and not enough.

—

I went to sleep last night exhausted from my reading.  There is sense among the nonsense but you need to dig and bring it up to light and study it.

If Suttree was a color it would be muddy greys and garish black and whites of town.  Suttree in a faded blue denim shirt and jeans, his eyes the surface color of the river.  I’ve walked and I’ve walked (another McCarthy technique in language) within this world, and come to feel as if I’m seeking something that lies within myself–as sought in Bud Suttree.  He touches lives along the way, the worse-off than him, the characters he’s chosen over those he left behind.  He cares, but in a way that’s almost planned yet seems a part of his salvation.

And this is where I wonder if the words are pulled from anguish and frustration at trying to explain the unexplainable.  The randomness of what sets off his thinking onto paths that cannot lead anywhere but back to himself.

The feeling is familiar to me, only not as bizarrely eloquent as is McCarthy’s way.

I’m still re-reading, and find that I can’t really just skim through because McCarthy’s writing style is not something that you can skim, nor would you want to.  In fact, his work needs to be read several times, especially if you want to enjoy the book as well as drool over his use of language.

But I find myself wondering more about his character, Bud Suttree.  I warmed right up to him, the maverick type, the one you don’t want to fall in love with because he’s his own man above all else. 

But is he really the good guy, intellect disguised to fit smoothly into his environment, or is he really a non-caring selfish bastard?

I’m finding things in Suttree I think I missed the first time around.  It makes me think that even though I’m skimming through the first half over again, when I get beyond the point I’ve read before I may still want to go through that last half again.

This conversation, between a ragman asking an unusual favor of Suttree and him agreeing to it.

Whatever’s right, said Suttree.

I ain’t no infidel.  Dont pay no mind to what they say.

No.

I always figured they was a God.

Yes.

I just never did like him.

Something else happening in my readings lately.  It’s never been my habit to read several books at the same time.  Rather, I like to focus on one and get into it, live it; and, if it’s good enough, to not only the exclusion of other written stories, but sadly, to the avoidance as much as possible of mundane chores and job-related time spenders.  It’s often been difficult, after reading a couple-three mysteries in a row, to adjust to a novel that isn’t. 

Reading Parker as well as McCarthy, and a few other things as well, I have found that McCarthy has become home to me.  Other forays have been shopping trips, adventures, study. 

But I somehow have learned to diversify or multi-task my reading.  McCarthy is where, after I read and absorb something else, I snuggle back into and hang out.  McCarthy, is home.

Had lost my way, backtracked a bit, no loss of awe the second time around.  McCarthy gives a dreary life, well…life.  Listen to this:

"The old man gave him a little crooked grin, his jawseams grouted with black spittle."

Tobacco chewer, this one.  Old, well weathered, worn, wrinkled.  Juice dribbled down, hardened, dried.

We see the characters despite the minimal direct description we get.  We learn  them from watching them, get comfortable with them, almost know what to expect of them, but we find things that still surprise us as we follow them around.

And in the midst of laidback simple living, McCarthy gives us heavy things to think about.  For example, as Suttree looks through an old family photo album:

"Put away these frozenjawed primates and their annals of ways beset and ultimate dark.  What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh.  This mawky worm-bent tabernacle."

Suttree is a free spirit, broken away from family chains, and yet not completely free.  The thoughts will torment where the people are no longer allowed to walk, their tracks the marking of their lives in his mind.

I have spent days walking through the backstreets of 1951 Knoxville, Tennessee.  With Suttree, catching fish, fighting cats that claim his catch before I get them.  Finding why the river is so flowing with the entrails not only of the gutted catch, but of the waste that’s tossed by human life.

McCarthy is nothing if he is not detailed with the flotsam of humanity.  There is such purpose yet commonality to every step each character takes along his path in life. 

He leaves me as weary as the fighting of the demons in Silent Hill.  There is such gloom in words that describe a city as fogged yet clear with depression and lost souls as ever the abandoned streets that James in SH 2 and I have walked along. 

With Suttree, I do feel safer somehow, yet carry that board with nail at the ready.  I do not fear the people, but the monsters are still there.

A bit of a strange phenomenon happening with this reading.  The "wow" factor of reading McCarthy is not interfering with the story.

It’s not, I’m sure, a disenchantment with McCarthy’s writing, but rather a getting used to and taking for granted his skill with language.   It reads smoother, easier, as I go along.  I think that if a normal sentence came along, I’d tend to think, "wow, that was less than exciting."

I’ll get back with some examples–I left the book in the shop–because I was thinking of it last night and again this morning; how language becomes a part of us and how it influences our further use of it.  This may tie in a bit with my tendency to write rather formally in the style of Poe, although I’ve lost the accent somewhat, just as a friend who has lived down south for many years has lost–to my ears–her New England accent.  She claims however, that to her family and friends down there, she’s not speaking southern at all.

If only, if only, if only, McCarthy rubs off on my writing as well.  What a combination of style layered over Edgar’s indelible stamp.

For me, one of the hallmarks of good writing and the essence of reading enjoyment is the relationship one finds in another’s written words to make the reading meaningful.  Experiencing of an event, once turned into memory, changes just through lack of detail or perception and emotion experienced at the moment.  But most, good or bad, temper like steel to remain fairly fixed in a new form and are stored away.  But what joy to bring them back by recall; sparked by hearing, seeing, or reading of something similar.

Going back to the watermelon patch, the farmer is pointing out the damage Harrogate has wreaked upon his crop:

I’m tellin ya, I seen him.  I didn’t know what the hell was goin on when he dropped his drawers.  Then when I seen what he was up to, I still didn’t believe it.  But yonder they lay.

What do you aim to do?

Hell, I don’t know.  It’s about too late to do anything.  He’s damn near screwed the whole patch.  I don’t see why he couldnt of stuck to just one.  Or a few.

This is a comment lament among farmers everywhere.  My mind immediately (after seeing the two men in the field, shaking their heads) called to the forefront my peach trees, and the bounty of ripening peaches each individually nicked by squirrel teeth almost without exception.  Likening Harrogate’s infidelity with melons to this made me laugh out loud.

Even the darkness of Cormac McCarthy’s stories can bring in the warmth and reality of human nature.

In going into that hallway to prepare for battle again and again, I find myself fascinated by the video that the first couple of times around well serves to shock and strike such fear.

It is unreal, a monstrous halfway-human form that’s struggling with a double legged mannequin in a somewhat perverted-looking dance.  But that’s the key–it is unreal; these creatures are not human thus we can accept whatever it is they’re doing, and also true, no one expects, I’m sure, for the reader/user to be spending so much time in there watching it again and again until it’s clearer.

But how much worse, McCarthy’s Harrogate, and his affinity for a field of virgin melons?  This thought occurred to me as I left Silent Hill 2 and faded into a calming break with Suttree.  Then I flipped back a bit to the beginning, and reread this episode, here which I’ll excerpt just a bit:

He knelt in the rich and steaming earth, his nostrils filled with the winey smell of ruptured melons.  To steal upon them where they lay, his hand on their warm ripe shapes, his pocketknife open.  He lifted one, a pale jade underbelly turning up.  He pulled it between his knees and sank the blade into its nether end.  He shucked off the strap of his overalls.  His pale shanks kneeling in a pool of denim.

Harrogate is a fictional character, but is so much more closely related to us, so much more the reaction to his act.  Is this what draws the line in visual graphics?  Will this be  something that is allowable in a virtual world someday?  Movies had to slowly run the course from their conception to where they stand today; from fadeout hints to showing all, and the inception of a rating system as a guide. 

And can video as well infuse Harrogate with the sympathy and humor as McCarthy gleans from us?  His words produce a sharp image, and our response is one of wha….? to shock perhaps as the dawn hits, to one of outright laughter if we find it funny, and God help me, I sure did.  Can this be duplicated or replaced satisfactorily in remediation?  Or do words sometimes, when skillfully used, have a power that is intrinsic to their nature alone.