Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy

First published: 1968

Type of plot: Surrealistic parable

Time of work: Indefinite, but probably the beginning of the twentieth century

Locale: Indefinite, but probably Southern Appalachia

Principal Characters:

• Rinthy Holme, a young mountain girl and new mother in search of her missing baby
• Culla Holme, Rinthy’s brother and the father of her child; he abandons the baby in the woods shortly after its birth
• An unnamed Tinker, who finds the child and takes it away, thus initiating the ensuing search
• Three Men of darkness, who appear at intervals throughout the journey and commit acts of brutality and mayhem

The Novel

Outer Dark is a story of sin and retribution, played out in folktale fashion against an indefinite time and place. It begins with the birth of a child, the incestuous offspring of Culla Holme and his sister Rinthy, who live in the mountainous recesses of Johnson County (no state is indicated). Culla, ashamed and frightened by his misdeed, refuses to summon aid for his sister, forcing her to give birth in the secrecy of their isolated cabin. When the child, a boy, is finally born after a long laboring, Culla takes the baby deep into the surrounding woods and leaves it, later telling Rinthy that it was sickly and died while she slept. Rinthy, however, refuses to believe her brother, especially when, after being led to the supposed grave site, she can find no trace of the baby’s remains. Convinced that Culla has given the child to a wandering tinker, who appeared at the cabin shortly before the birth, Rinthy sneaks away from her brother in a blind search for the old man and her baby. When Culla discovers her absence, he follows after her, with no real understanding of his purpose in doing so.

The novel is thus constructed in terms of the encounters these two characters experience as they wander throughout a dreamlike and most often nightmarish landscape. The tinker disappears, known only by rumor, but Rinthy is led by a kind of innocence and faith that protects and sustains her. Culla, on the other hand, following in his sister’s steps, becomes an Ishmael in this outside world, suspect and fugitive wherever he goes. His guilt concerning the child dogs him and takes on a universal identity. He is anathema to those he meets.

At intervals during Culla’s wanderings there appear three dark figures—perhaps escaped murderers, perhaps malignant supernatural beings, perhaps even the demoniac shapes of Satan himself. Dressed in clothes stolen from the grave, these manifestations plague the land with atrocities, deeds for which Culla is inevitably blamed. The leader, clad in black, proclaims himself a minister. His two followers are a psychopath named Harmon (the only one of the three with a name) and a mute, monstrous idiot. Emblems of horrifying evil, these three are also figures of judgment and retribution who face Culla with his overwhelming guilt and exact punishment in a final scene of inevitable justice.

The Characters

The characters in Outer Dark are drawn in broad surface strokes. The reader rarely enters their minds, and he is often left to guess at their motivations, which may be quite different from their stated purposes. For example, Culla Holme is ashamed of his incestuous coupling with his sister. When Rinthy is in labor, Culla refuses to summon outside help, even that of an old witch, a “midnight woman,” because “She’d tell.” “Who is they to tell?” Rinthy asks. “Anybody,” Culla answers. Although he himself helps with the birth, he does so only at the last minute, after his sister has undergone great pain. Clearly he is giving her a chance to die, hoping that she will take the proof of their sin with her.

Culla’s attempt to rid himself of the child after its birth is also marked by a combination of cruelty and cowardice. Rather than simply murder the child, he leaves it to die in the midst of the night swamp and flees in dread and panic from the sight and sound of his wailing son. Yet in his flight he becomes lost and circles unknowingly back to the scene of his guilt, where the baby still howls in outrage and accusation.

The pattern is repeated after Rinthy takes off in search of the child. Culla comes after, perhaps to find Rinthy, although he never asks of her from the strangers he meets on the way. Indeed, it is possible that Culla’s following his sister is more a matter of fate than intent, and that his movement is still flight rather than search. Moreover, his journey continues to circle, and the book ends as he walks along a road leading to a swamp, likely the very one in which he was lost at the beginning.

Rinthy Holme owes much of her characterization to William Faulkner’s Lena Grove in Light in August. Like Lena, Rinthy is, despite her obvious sexual experience, an innocent in the alien world. She has true love for her child, who causes her neither shame nor regret. When Culla tells her that the child is dead, she wants to see the grave, to lay her baby in the earth. When Culla confesses that the child is still alive, she simply sets out after it. Her breasts continue to make milk months after she begins her search; to her the milk is a sign that the child still lives. As she tells the skeptical doctor who examines her, “I don’t live nowheres no more. . . . I never did much. I just go around huntin my chap. That’s about all I do any more.”

Again like Lena Grove, Rinthy Holme illustrates a deep yet simple faith in life. Because she does not lie or dissemble, she is met with general kindness by the strangers she encounters. They constantly offer her food, shelter, security. Only her love for her child keeps her on the road. Culla, however, is always held in suspicion. He is once arrested for trespassing, once threatened with hanging, always pursued by the possibility of punishment.

The third character to be considered in this novel is the tinker, an ambiguous figure at best. In some ways he is reminiscent of the archetypal Wandering Jew, doomed to roam without end. He straps himself in harness to pull his cart like an animal. He is associated with evil, enticing Culla with liquor and obscene books. Later he refuses to return to Rinthy the child he has found. Yet he is also the victim of evil. “I’ve seen the meanness of humans till I don’t know why God ain’t put out the sun and gone away,” he tells Rinthy, and later he is murdered by the three strangers, who in turn take the child away from him. There is the suggestion that, in the end, Culla has taken the tinker’s place as the eternal wanderer on nameless roads.

The most disturbing figure in the novel, however, is the bearded leader of the dark murderous trio. On two occasions Culla stumbles into his company. All others who encounter him are killed, but Culla, in a perverse way, is almost welcomed, as if he were expected. “We ain’t hard to find,” the man tells Culla. “Oncet you’ve found us.” At the first meeting around their campfire, they force him to eat with them a black, nameless meat which he consumes with great difficulty and disgust. It is a terrible meal, a blasphemous communion with these creatures of darkness. The bearded man seems to know Culla’s secret. “Everything don’t need a name, does it?” he asks Culla, and later says of himself, “Some things is best not named.” At the second meeting, after they have killed the tinker and taken the child, the leader acts as prosecutor and demands that Culla acknowledge his son, who is now hideously disfigured. When Culla once again denies the child, the bearded man cuts its throat and throws the small corpse to the mute, who apparently devours it. The act enforces a kind of terrible justice. The dark man is a figure of death, certainly, but also of retribution. He demands that payment be exacted for Culla’s sin, and when the job is done, the three men disappear.

Critical Context

Outer Dark was Cormac McCarthy’s second novel; his first book, The Orchard Keeper (1965), had won the William Faulkner Foundation First Novel Award for 1965. McCarthy has always been grouped with other Southern “Gothic” writers because of his penchant for violent and dark stories. One of the charges most often brought against him is that the arcane, polysyllabic vocabulary he sometimes employs is in direct imitation of Faulkner and serves to obscure rather than enrich his work. McCarthy, however, is a dedicated and serious writer who has developed very much his own voice and worldview. The so-called Gothic qualities of his writings come from a profound belief in man’s spiritual and moral obligations. He is Catholic in background—he attended Catholic High School in Knoxville—and he infuses his Southern settings and characters with a stark religiosity. In this sense he is closer to Flannery O’Connor than to Faulkner.

Although appreciated more by critics than the general reader, McCarthy is one of the finest of modern American writers. His books since Outer Dark—Child of God (1974), Suttree (1979), and Blood Meridian (1985)—have shown him to be unswerving in his vision and artistry.

Bibliography

Aldrich, John W. “Cormac McCarthy’s Bizarre Genius: A Reclusive Master of Language and the Picaresque, on a Roll.” The Atlantic Monthly 274 (August, 1994): 89-97. Traces the evolution of McCarthy’s fiction, from the publication of Orchard Keeper in 1965 to All the Pretty Horses in 1994. Offers brief analyses of Outer Dark and Suttree.

Arnold, Edwin T. “Blood and Grace: The Fiction of Cormac McCarthy.” Commonweal 121 (November 4, 1994): 11-14. Arnold asserts that McCarthy’s novels often explore the more negative aspects of the human condition in meaningful, religiously significant ways. He discusses several of McCarthy’s works.

Arnold, Edwin T., and Diane C. Luce, eds. Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. This collection of ten essays explores the historical and philosophical influences on McCarthy’s work, the moral center that informs his writings, and the common themes of his fiction. Includes an extensive bibliography.

Jarret, Robert J. Cormac McCarthy. New York: Twayne, 1997. Jarret offers a detailed examination of all seven of McCarthy’s works, including Outer Dark and Suttree. His masterful study compares McCarthy’s early fiction to the regionalists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, discusses McCarthy’s shift of locale to the Southwest, and analyzes the distinctive aspects of McCarthy’s writing.