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Demythologizing the South: Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree in an Intertextual Perspective
Grażyna Maria Teresa Branny
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2017.12.005
Pedagogical University, Cracow, Poland
The article is structured around a premise of intertextuality, which is suggested not only by McCarthy’s own more or less overt allusions to Faulkner’s writing but also by the very name of his protagonist Suttree, which is evocative of the name of perhaps the best known Faulkner villain Thomas Sutpen. This supposition in turn leads to an argument that in his 1979 novel McCarthy does indeed reverse the life story of Thomas Sutpen by making Suttree descend down the very path that Sutpen ascended a century and a half before him, i.e., from the ranks of Southern aristocracy to the scum of the earth, and in defiance of the same ideology that Sutpen went to great lengths to embrace. Thus, an intertextual and comparative approach to McCarthy’s novel not only in the context of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! but also his Light in August (cf. Joe Christmas) and The Sound and the Fury (cf. Quentin) as well as Ellen Glasgow’s short story “Jordan’s End” demonstrates that what Cormac McCarthy actually does in Suttree is to demythologize the South, complete with its aristocratic pretensions (“doing pretty”), dubious morality (incest) and fear of miscegenation (obsession with time and the double). Moreover, in doing so, he defamiliarizes it by reducing it to its Other (poor whites and African Americans), whose authenticity, liveliness and charitability defy the affectation, lifelessness and decadence of the aristocratic South.
Cormac McCarthy, William Faulkner, the South, intertextuality, demythologization, defamiliarization
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